I’ve recently seen videos on YouTube showing gear ratios like 30 million to 1 when you spin the first gear super fast at 10.000rpm and the last gear spins so slow it would take 300 hours to spin once for example. Searching for the opposite doesn’t give any result, the highest I found was 1:625.
Why is that we can have millions:1 gear ratios but not 1:millions?
In: Engineering
Each gear tooth is like a lever with the fulcrum at the center of the gear. Just like with simple levers, there are practical limits to the forces gears can sustain depending on the materials they are made of. As the gear ratio decreases, it is akin to a simple lever getting longer, and farther from the fulcrum, and therefore needs to be made of stronger materials. The stronger materials are more expensive, and therefore less practical than other ways available to obtain the requisite speeds.
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