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
Two reasons:
* If you’re increasing the speed something spins, you’re decreasing torque (how hard is it turning, or how hard is it to stop). At some point you’d need an insanely powerful motor, just to overcome the friction at the last gear and make it turn.
* Even if you had a motor that powerful, you’d need gears that can survive that torque, and gears that can rotate fast enough without breaking from centrifugal force.
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