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Inigo wrote:But Harold talked about shimming the main spring arbour, to avoid the bull gear from attacking the spindle sideways. Nothing to do with the spindle gear and governor worm. I'm suffering this case. One thing is that if you fix the drive gear well up against the upper motor plate, the imperfections don't let it run smoothly. You have to leave a small gap between them. Advice: when installing the drive gear, don't push it up the spindle completely. The sliding surfaces of the set screw collar and the upper motor plate are not polished, so the spindle will be retained at one or more places in one turn. This eats out the spring power, and the effect is a clanking noise in the governor, for it is losing the power that drives it, and the gear backlash comes into action.

Are you suggesting that it is poor practice to polish the spindle shaft to allow the spindle gear to slide on easily?
Dave D

Hi Dave,
It sounded to me that Inigo is suggesting that the collar on the turntable shaft (immediately on the underside of the top plate) will rub against the underside of the top plate which was not meant to be a sliding interface. If assembled with no up and down movement of the spindle shaft, it forces the collar to rub against the underside of the upper plate which creates friction which varies during each revolution of the spindle shaft. The effect of that occasional friction during rotation is to alternately allow the governor to run up to speed but then slow it down when friction increases, hence the gear backlash he refers to. The idea is to allow the power train to be unimpeded by what would otherwise be the periodic friction introduced when the collar is too tight against the underside of the top plate.
Cheers,
Don

@vichighmathguy.... that's it, exactly! I've had this problem, and the effect you notice is the clanking noise at the governor, and everything stops. it's because the spindle drive gear is stopped, and as it is who impulses the governor, this is suddenly fault of power, and it clanks and stops.. at first, it seems a problem in the governor itself, but it isn't!