you wrote;

:::Does a guy have any rights to reverse engineer a part that he will not get any other way and that he requires to rebuild his existing unit?:::

First... he should explore and exhaust (at a minimum) all legitimate avenues to satisfying his needs. In the case of the transformers... there are a whole host of companies out there who would be happy to design and build a transformer to your requirements.

the other thing to remember and take into consideration in our specific case vis-a-vis doug's piracy of our design... is that we do build this transformer and actually have coil stock on it. So it is not like it is forlorn to some ole' dusty "archival" bin. It's a real live part and the design does belong to us.

mike