So i know a lever has two sides, the effort and the load.
If the effort side is longer it means the angle is larger, but then it requires less force to push the load side.
Does a lever work because the weight you are manipulating has been equally divided between the whole swing distance of the “effort” side of the lever?
Am I thinking about this correctly?
In: Physics
Here is the way I think of levers and similar “simple machines”
Simple machines *transform* the way the effort is applied.
There’s two terms I like to use in this “transformed effort”. There is torque effort which is how **hard** you are pushing and there is distance effort which is how **long** you are pushing.
Let’s say we have a lever with a very long effort side and a very short load side. This makes it “very easy” to move the load right?
Instead of using the effort in a push/torque way, you’re now using it in a **distance way**. You may not have to push as hard to lift the load, but you now have to push *farther*. You are also lifting the load up a shorter ways, but you are still lifting the same amount of weight.
The same system applied to the rest of the simple machines.
For pulleys, every pulley makes the torque-effort half as hard, but makes the distance-effort twice as hard.
For gears, if you are driving a 4-tooth gear and an 8-tooth gear is being driven, you are converting distance-effort into torque-effort.
It’s easier for me to explain this in terms of gears, which are just a bunch of interlocked levers. GM has a really good old training video about this for explaining how a transmission works.
Say you have a big wheel and a small wheel. You spin the big wheel. It spins the smaller wheel very fast, because spinning your wheel a half rotation has more than a half rotation to the smaller wheel because of it’s smaller size.
Similarly, when you move a lever, the individual motion, the half a pull or whatever, you’re moving your bit very far. It’s creating very little movement on the other side. But what little you move has more torque on account of angles and shit
I’m toasted right now I’ll explain again in the morning if you remind me.
You’re definitely on the right track.
If the effort side of a lever is longer, then you are actually moving the load a shorter distance! So you are accomplishing less work. This means it takes less force.
Or seen the other way, you are moving the lever farther, so you are doing more work even if each bit of work takes less force.
Think of a clock that you can move with your fingers.
When you push the minute hand, it’s easy to do. When you push the hour hand, it takes a little more push to move it, but you don’t need to move it as far.
This is how a lever works. If the lever is longer then you don’t have to push it as hard, but you have to move it further. The same amount of work is still done though.
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