In products such as personal printers and typewriters, gears have usually been mounted on steel shafts about which they rotate. Such assemblies contain many parts and usually require several riveting operations and/or fasteners during assembly. With modem plastic materials, however, it is generally not necessary to have gears rotate on steel surfaces.
Normally, plastic is molded around or mixed with supporting members. In accordance with this invention individual plastic elements, such as spacers and shafts for gears, are molded at separated locations on a support member. This is believed to be a novel technique for such purpose. The following two patents disclose molding by which parts of the molding frame become integrated into the final element produced, but not the molding of individual elements at separated locations: U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,015,859 to Bloom and 4,462,949 to Fehlmann.