Engineering skills: gearing

I came up with the idea of this new post when I started building an amazing elevator mechanism with my friend Alec.

We made it because we were actually trying to build a bridge that was at least 10cm high and 20cm long but there weren’t enough bricks to use because there were 22 other people in pairs trying to achieve the exact same results, that’s when we came up with our new invention.

Today I will teach you a basic way to make one gear go faster then the other just by the turn of a handle.

Gears are basically wheels with these bumps on them which we call teeth.

The bigger the gear the more teeth it has.

To make the gears go faster first you need to have two gears, with one bigger then the other. Add a handle to the axle connected to the bigger gear and the add a handle to the other axle, then turn the handle connected to the bigger gear and you will see that the handle you are not turning will go faster then the one you are turning.

Warning! Make sure that the teeth on the 2 gears are blending together so one will turn the other!

How does this happen? Well the big gear has a larger circumference which means it has more teeth. That means that every time the big gear completes one full rotation the small gear would have completed around 2 or 3 full rotations depending on the size of the gear.

You can do this exact thing lots of time in a row to make it go even way faster then before by just adding the same large gear onto the axle holding the small gear and then do the same procedure again.

Warning! If you do this procedure too many times it may result in to much pressure on the first axle causing it to bend, stiffen or even snap!