Abstract: An automated home beer brewing machine and method makes beer in a single vessel under automatic control. The machine and method allows making of wort for beer without requiring apparatus to be sanitized, without boiling the wort, without the use of a traditional water-filled fermentation lock, and without using a wort chiller or ice-packing of a brewing pot. The inventive single-vessel automated brewing operation allows the user to load ingredients, conduct a grain-steeping if desired, and then automatically carries out the rest of the brewing process in a single vessel, until summoning the user days later to sugar-prime and bottle the beer. Thus, the user is required to provide much less time and labor than conventional home beer brewing, and the invention also frees the home-hobby brewer of much of the current art traditionally attached to home brewing.

Abstract: A pushbutton switch including a keycap having a keycap top and a keycap plunger, a retaining bezel for guiding the keycap plunger and limiting the displacement thereof, a deformable elastomeric switch button supporting a contact pad, and a printed circuit contact pattern engageable by the contact pad when the switch button is deformed by the downward displacement of the keycap plunger. The deformation of the button switch provides tactile feedback, while impact of the keycap top against the retaining bezel provides audible feedback. The pushbutton switch is configured to limit the downward displacement of the keycap plunger to avoid excessive force on the printed circuit board.

Abstract: A retractable pin sprocket drive for feeding paper employs free floating, radially moving, cam actuated sprocket pins in axially spaced sprocket hubs forming sprocket wheels. The pins are slidably fitted in equally angularly spaced radial slots in each sprocket hub. The sprocket wheels are each journalled in a sprocket wheel housing and the sprocket pins are moved radially only by a stationary cam track in each sprocket housing as the sprocket wheels rotate. Insertion of paper having perforated edges is facilitated by means providing for the precise axial spacing of the sprocket wheels and angular positioning of the sprocket wheels and pins in relation to the perforations or holes along the edges of the paper, together with transparent sprocket wheel housings and openings therethrough permitting viewing of the sprocket pins and the holes in the paper as they come together, to permit precise sprocket pin insertion into the holes in the paper.

Abstract: A part, providing its own plastic deformation method and an exemplary embodiment, a polycarbonate spur gear, is disclosed. In a part having at least one region adapted to be deformed due to press-fit forces acting upon said region deformation is decoupled from proximate critical surfaces by providing at least one aperture in said part in a second region which is spaced from said first region in the general direction of the resultant vector of said forces such that said deformation is relieved by said aperture.In its basic aspects, an exemplary embodiment of the present invention, a plastic spur gear which remains rotationally concentric by embodying the inventive concept is described.