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
They are essentially the same thing 1:milion and million:1 just means you drive the other end. It would really work in practice, though. There is a simple rule in play, if you multiply the speed, then you divide the torque. This means trying to do the reverse would require so much torque, in practice, that it would simply snap the shaft even if it were made of steel.
When you reduce the speed, you multiply the torque, so very little stress is placed on the driving shaft. The other way wouldn’t work because even a little friction or resistance on the end would multiply itself to a huge torque required on the driving side.
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