I understand the basics of how the clutch/gears work and that if the input speed is too high for the gear, you shift to the gear that can handle the higher speed. But what makes that gear able to withstand that? Isn’t the gear smaller, which would make it spin faster?
Hope this makes sense to car people.
In: Engineering
It’s actually easier to understand by looking at a bicycle, which is the same kind of system but more linear. Imagine that the biker always wants to be pedaling at a constant rate.
A smaller (higher) only requires a few teeth (fewer crank rotations) to turn the wheel once. However, since it’s trying to spin so much mass, it requires a lot of input force to overcome the inertia of the mass. If the wheel already has a lot of rotational inertia then a lot of torque isn’t *needed* to maintain a high speed.
A bigger (lower) gear requires many teeth (and many crank rotations) to turn the wheel. However, the size of the gear gives it much more torque, so it gets the wheel up to speed with less effort.
And since the biker/car always wants to be rotating the input (cranks/engine) at a constant rate, they must shift to higher and lower torque gears depending on the needs.
As for how the gear can *physically* withstand it – it’s a thick chuck of metal that really only has to spin (transmit rotation). As long as the system’s not getting locked up on anything it is plenty strong enough to transmit rotation.
Hope that helps.
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