Ikon System M

[Han Fey]

Zeiss Ikon: Rotor scramble tester

The Ikon engineers wanted to know if the rotors turned enough to locking position, when retracting the key

[mhmh]

Thanks Han, great interesting pictures!

[Han Fey]

These old Ikon engineers had some very clever ideas, testing their new designs. The speed you pull out the key had also influence on the scrambling of the rotors. With this “tool” they could see the influence on the same pulling out speed.

I also have a Sperwellen tester, the used during designing the 2PE.

[distiller]

Oh, we would love to see this as weel. And thanks for sharing again :-)

[dagoth]

Wow, awesome pictures! Just something I've observed and don't quite get, why does each of the rotors have three gates and all of them side by side? Just because it belongs to a locking system and it randomly happened to be next to each other or is there any other mechanism/idea behind it?

[distiller]

I think, it's to test the edge cases. This assembly should test the locking of the sidebar and three opening positions are the "worst" possible option. But just my opinion.

[mhmh]

Der Versuchsaufbau schien ja rein auf optischer Beobachtung zu basieren, also vermutlich wurden dem Ingenieur dann Fotos zur Begutachtung vorgelegt, vielleicht auch von Hochgeschwindigkeitskameras, mit denen man das Einschwingen beobachtet?
Und da sind optische Markierungen nützlich - bevor man dann mit dem Winkelmesser anfängt usw.