Disassembly and repair of SF-210 and SF-200 batch adapter

One of the failure modes I discovered with SF-210 is a worn out worm gear. The symptom is a loud grinding noise during the slide feeding process. In the advanced stage the slide feeder stops working altogether. The disassembly procedure is simple and takes just a few minutes. The difficulty is a gear itself - I could not find a simple replacement. I ended up carefully measuring the original one and making a solid model for this gear in Autodesk Inventor. I had then had it printed on 3D printer. The replacement seems to work fine. I had recently uploaded the model to i.materialize, you can order it here.

1) This SF-210 has a magazine cover broken off - it does not affect the performance or disassembly procedure. Remove the 2 screws indicated by the red circles.

2) Flip it over and remove these two screws. Now you can pull the slide magazine to the side and detach it from the rest of the unit.

3) Here is how it looks with the slide magazine detached. Remove the screw indicated by the red circle.

4) Use a flat head screwdriver to push in the area indicated by a red arrow, while simultaneously pulling the front cover in the direction indicated by a blue arrow.

5) The front cover will come off. Now you can see the hidden clip and see why you needed to push with a screwdriver in the previous step. Remove the screw indicated by the red circle.

6) Remove 3 crews indicated by red circles and take off the back cover.

7) Now the drive mechanism is exposed and you can see the problem - worn out plastic worm gear.

8) Show here for comparison are the worn out gear and a new gear I made using 3D printer (it is generously covered with silicone grease).

9) New gear is installed. I printed my gears for a very tight fit. In order to mount them I first warm them up with a heat gun, then they slip on easily and stay really tight after they cool down. Just do not overheat them! Lubricate other gears (silicone or teflon grease) and assemble in the reverse order. It should work properly now. Good luck!

By the way, sometimes the motor itself fails. The original Minebea part is PPN13KA11C - a good replacement part available from Digi-Key is PPN13PB11C.