how a gearbox work

Forgive my bluntness (or should that be "4give me"?) but this sounds like an anonymous junior high questioner....

Perhaps this sort of answer will help you: a shaft capable of transmitting so much torque (turning effort) at some speed can be passed through a gear box to provide an output shaft with more or less torque and less or more RPM so long as the product of torque times RPM is about the same - actually a bit less - coming out of the box, as going in.

Brian Whatcott Altus OK

Maybe find a little toy car (made in China), tear it apart, and look at the gearbox. Then share what you find with the rest of us. Those gearbox concepts are puzzling to even the most experienced engineers.

Please get out of the engineering program at your university. I understood your problem before I entered the university. Gears, for the most part, are simple to understand and demonstrate. Since simple straightforward concepts are beyond you, you should go into Marketing. There you don't have to understand things beyond your own reality.

Isn't that a bit of a crappy thing to say? I didn't know jack about gears before engineering school either. (I knew they transmitted power, but I didn't know about reduction, ratios, pitch, etc). And in my current job, I deal with fluids. I haven't looked at a gear in a long time. A good engineering education will teach you this stuff, in both hands-on experience and the theory and math required to really understand it.

Sure, in my university design courses, there were "gearheads" who'd been tearing cars, etc. apart since they were kids. There were also a fair amount of people who'd done little to no hands-on stuff prior to pre-engineering school, freshman year classes. You could conceivably discourage potentially good engineers by saying that if you don't know xyz going into it, you will not be a decent engineer. If you have the drive and desire, and capability to learn, you can succeed. IMO and IME as well.

(though it's true, by sophomore year, he or she should have had a basic design course, and/or had *some* exposure to the concept of power transfer in high school physics. I just don't agree that not knowing this *now* is any reason to give up on learning about it. )

regards, k wallace

So far all of the good engineers that I have met have been the "hands-on" type that have actually touched tools. For example, when I was in school I was taking a class called "Creative Problem Solving" there was a person who claimed to be going into engineering. He was going to use a gear box that used 2 gears that are the same size where one had twice as many teeth as the other for a 2:1 gear ratio. I hope that he went into something besides engineering.

You may be an exception, but from my experience and the experience of my co-workers, the best engineers are engineers that have taken things apart and had an understanding of how things work BEFORE they entered a university.

You sound like a touchy-feelly type of bleeding heart liberal who believes that all problems can be worked out if we just talk about them and show lots of emotion. If this dude had the "...drive and desire, and capability to learn..." he wouldn't be asking really basic questions about gearboxes in a Usenet group in his SECOND YEAR OF ENGINEERING SCHOOL!!!

If

a)question: what does 'emotion' have do to with drive, and desire and capability to learn? (answer- nothing.)

b)"bleeding heart liberal" is about as far as you can get from my socio-political beliefs and still be discussing the topic.

c)Great that *you* had all your hands-on experience before you went to college. Not everyone has. Are all ME's gearheads? Nope. I'm not. I'm pretty successful, and know my shit in my field.

d) Back to the OP, the question was worded very badly. The OP needs to work on their writing and communication skills as much, if not more than, their knowledge of specific power transfer devices.

regards k wallace

Waaahhh!!! What I was trying to convey to you is that if the OP had the drive, desire, and capability to learn he would have done at least a Google search to find out how a gearbox works. Or, since he is a second year engineering student, he could have looked in his school's library. Instead, he is asking to be spoon-fed an answer to a basic engineering concept from this newsgroup with no effort on his part. It has nothing to do with prior knowlege or hands on experience before college. Then some liberal bleeding heart such as yourself might just bail him out before he flunks his next midterm exam.

f*ck it, I tried to explain myself twice. k w

Profanity is an obvious sign of a weak mind.

as is repetition of mindless and unapplicable cliches- see "liberal bleeding heart" x 2...which made me chuckle both times. You really can't scan someone's ideology from a single opinion post. If you believe you can, you are of a weaker mind than you seem to think I am. ending this, now.

Can't we all just get along? :)

Here are some random thoughts

perhaps the OP is not a native English speaker, my Spanish is pretty good but I'd be surprised if it would work in a Spanish newsgroup

30 or 40 years ago, most, if not all ME students (or pre eng) had a fair amount of mechanical eperience, it was a different time

the space program, was going full tilt, lots of stuff was still made in the US, stuff wasn't as inexpensive as it is today, repair actually made economic sense.

You could dig into a $600 microwave & do some good, today why bother when you can get a replacement for

Speaking as a more recent college graduate, there are still a lot of opportunities for taking things apart or at least building things that go. Lego has the Mindstorms kits, which include a computer controller, gears, and other things that give a hands on experience. I also spent time fixing my car. Granted it is not like today where kids don't have much free time, but lucky for me my parents were middle class and couldn't afford to keep 6 kids busy all the time. One thing that I have noticed is that people just 6 years younger than me lack a lot of sense when it comes to building things.

You made a huge point is saying that kids today don't ever get their hands into things. That is a bad thing for engineers because the better designers understand the keypoint of design. For example my dad is a ME for a drug manufacturer. He had a project where they were adding a machine and the jr. Engineer who was in charge told the workers to cut through a support beam in the floor. That was one of those Duh moments when any decent engineer would have realized that their placement was wrong, and would have figured out an alternate location, but this engineer didn't think there would be any problem with a weaker floor holding up a large piece of equipment.

"YouGoFirst" wrote in news:5rm7h.293121$ snipped-for-privacy@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net:

Heh, we had a fresh, young engineer erase a vertical building support column from the floor plan because it was in the way of where he wanted the machine. Unfortunately, that was the last machine in a row of 12 connected machines to be installed, his manager was not very happy at having to pay to move 11 machines a second time, not to mention they missed the deadline because of it and had to scramble to get parts made to keep from missing shipments.