Combining involute curves and body curves, merging factory and fashion, Winzeler Gear has transformed one of its products into gear haute couture. Winzeler Gear has created a plastic gear dress.

When you're manufacturing fun, very often you need gears. The Addendum team recently went on a behind-the-scenes gear-finding mission with Jerold S. Kaplan, Principal Engineer, Show/Ride Mechanical Engineering at Walt Disney Imagineering in Lake Buena Vista, FL. We found that at least part of Disney's magic comes from good, old-fashioned mechanical engineering.

Chicken Run - the summer that used stop-motion clay figures - is about a group of chickens laying a plan to escape from their farm before they're turned into chicken pies. Distributed by Steven Spielberg's Dream Works, Chicken Run is also about a group of specially-made worms and wheels.

The addendum team has just returned from IMTS 2000, and we were surprised to see several new names among the gear industry suppliers at the show.

We'd like to thank our friends down at Sanderson Brothers Pty. Ltd., Thomastown, Australia, for bringing the work of Capt. S. Bramley-Moore to our attention. So, without further ado, we offer you the following poem to help you keep your gear formulae straight.

Oliver E Saari was an engineer with two great professional loves in his life - writing and gear design, and he was devoted to each in their turn. The same original thinking that informed his fiction, giving life to tales of space exploration, the evolution of man, and many other topics, let him to become one of the great pioneers in gear design.

When the steam engine became available for industrial use at the end of the eighteenth century, it was mainly used for driving plunger-pumps, such as those used in English coal mines. The stream engine's piston drove a lever, that reciprocating motion of which drove the pump plunger. Called the "Beam Machine," this mechanism needed a lot of space, had many parts, and was difficult to install because the engine and the pump had to be properly aligned.

Clocks with wooden gears? In these days of gears made from plastic, steel and exotic materials; it is a little unusual to hear about a practical application for wooden gears. But that is exactly what David Scholl, the owner of Changing Times, a Harlingen, TX, clockmaker is offering us.

Saginaw, Michigan, may be home to the only gear operation in the world that requires the use of a Zamboni machine. It may also be the only place in the world where teeth on the Gears are optional.

You go, and if your name is Ryan Boxx, you go faster than everyone else. Boxx became the fastest 15-year-old in America this summer when he won his division of the National Hot Rod Association's Junior Drag Racing League National Championship.