Can someone please explain how the clutch and gears work in a car as I’m learning and I can’t quite understand it
In: 4
Linked to a video under tohowie’s comment, but if you want a verbal explanation, here goes:
There are two important types of velocity for gears, rotational and linear. Rotational is how many times something spins in an amount of time, linear is how much distance it covers.
If I walk around a room once in a minute and the Flash runs around the whole city in a minute, we both have the same rotational velocity (we each did one rotation!), but he’s obviously covering more distance than me.
Ultimately what we want to do is take rotational velocity in our engine (measured as RPMs) and get linear velocity out of our wheels. But for our wheels to turn, we need to push the whole car which is really, really heavy.
So what do we do? We help our engine by letting it “spread out” the push over many rotations. By using differently sized gears, we can let the engine turn many times for each turn of the wheel. If our engine gear is half the size of the gear going to wheel, then each turn of our engine only has to drive half a turn of the wheel. By altering the ratio of those gears, we can alter how hard our engine has to push.
In low gear (the engine gear is small relative to the wheel gear), your engine can turn more times to push the wheel, which takes strain off the transmission. In high gear, you can get more power out of your engine.
Your car can have several sets of gears, and the clutch temporarily separate the gears so that you can move from one set to another.
I’m trying to practice explaining things to my daughter, watch some automechanic is going to see this and cry.
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