Не правда ли, этот ряд аналогий .... (full sentence)

17:56 Mar 17, 2002 

The questions lead the mind off in new directions and may keep me from being as much a stick-in-the-mud as I tend to be !!!

17:22 Mar 17, 2002 

I'm naturally inclined to trust Natalie's opinion ;-). This was a real headscratcher for me, enough to make me nervous, and I'm very grateful for the reinforcement. When authors get into the polemics of science and engineering, my sense of Russian starts to weaken, probably because it's overly rational. This will certainly be the first of many questions over time for the most helpful Kudoz group, who continually give me new insights.

I think Diana might be largely correct in an industrial commentary. Academic and industrial terminologies do diverge, which can be quite maddening. But the literature trail is clear here, and the drawings amplify it. The ultimate screw surface is a spiral helix. Each annular blank becomes a single segment (just barely more than one wrap around the core) and its dimensioning depends on its position in the spiral. Those factors don't affect the sentence in question, but they contribute to the overall choice of vocabulary. I do appreciate the insight into the shop-floor terms !!! Thanks

And Marcus M.'s observations are good. I debated 'universal', but the phrase for machine building has been cast in stone as general-purpose, so I stuck with it, given that the technique applies to just two generic kinds of helicoids... Thanks!!