I know torque means acceleration speed, but what does 261 lbs ft mean
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Courtesy of carwow
Imagine you’re tightening a nut with a spanner. Using a short spanner takes a lot of effort to tighten the nut. Using a longer spanner takes less effort to tighten the nut to the same extent. The longer spanner has more torque.
Let’s put that in car terms. You’re driving along at 40mph in top gear and put your foot down. A car with low torque – a short spanner – won’t accelerate quickly at that point. A car with high torque – a long spanner – will. To put it simply, the more torque you have, the more effortless the acceleration will feel.
Take a wrench with a 1 foot long handle, attach to a bolt head, and have a 261lb person stand on the end of the handle. A tire iron and a lug nut would be a real world example. That’s 261 ft-lb of torque
Torque is a force caused by the rotation of a mass. Torque is the power. Depending upon how you gear the transmission, you can use that torque for quick acceleration or for hauling heavy loads.
It’s how hard the engine can turn the wheel. Imagine a 1 foot rod is attached to the output. The engine would be able to hold up a 261 pound weight (note this is a thought experiment to explain the unit). If you put a 280 pound weight in the end, it would fall.
If something has 261 lb-ft of torque, that means that it can output 261 lbs of force at the end of a 1 ft lever, or 1 lbs of force at the end of a 261 ft lever, or any other combination of numbers that multiply to 261
It’s for tightening the bolts.
You take a torque wrench, set it to that and apply it. It tightens the bolt to exactly 261 foot pounds and indicates it (by a dial or click more commonly)
It is a measure of twistiness. It means the cars engine can twist the driveshaft with the same amount of twistiness as a 261 foot long wrench with a 1 pound weight attached to it, or a 1 foot wrench with a 261 lb weight attacked to it.
Pounds are a unit of force, but since cars use rotation to move you want to know how that force is applied. Try closing a door from the doorknob and then from near the hinges, if the same force is applied the door will close easier when you push near the knob, because there is more torque. The engine has to twist the drive shaft which twists the wheels (oversimplifying of course), so the more twistiness the engine can produce the faster it can make the wheels go from not spinning to spinning very fast. This matters when you want to accelerate quickly.
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