I'm in the process of restoring/repairing an old piece of electronics that has a broken rotary encoder. Actually, the encoder itself still works, but the shaft is completely broken off (I have to carefully use a screwdriver to turn it at the moment). I've looked around online, but sadly, this part (#ES365943 in the service manual) is nowhere to be found. I know that the encoder has 3 pins, 24 detents... but that's about it.

Is there a way to test this part to figure out its specs and order an equivalent? I'm not terribly familiar with encoders, but from what I understand, simple clockwise/counter-clockwise data knobs like this typically use a standard 2 channel configuration. I opened up the encoder and it looks dead simple - 2 wipers make contact with 2 dotted carbon rings. Basically what I'm wondering is, regardless of the number of detents/pulses, shouldn't another encoder work as long as it outputs data that the sampler can read?

Thanks

 

....it depends on what the piece of equipment is, if it doesn't measure the frequency of the pulses you should be fine, though, you will see a difference in speed of pulses if you have a different encoder resolution.

Also, your encoder sounds like a quadrature encoder, so make sure the replacement is too...