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This tends to be the most difficult aspect of gearing for people to keep straight, and I find it helps to think of it in a relative fashion. Conversely, if you wanted to gain more power, you could 1) decrease the pinion gear's tooth count or 2) increase the spur gear's tooth count. Both of these options will decrease the low-end power of the truck while simultaneously increasing the overall top speed. If you wanted to get more speed for this truck, you could either 1) increase the pinion gear's tooth count or 2) lower the spur gear's tooth count. The stock gearing is important to know because it is useful to have a baseline to go back to in case you get too extreme in your gearing. For the purposes of this article, we'll use a Traxxas Slash VXL 2WD truck and its stock 86-tooth spur gear and 23-tooth pinion gear, though the concepts we're discussing can be used on almost any vehicle. The best place to start is always the manufacturer's stock, or default, gearing set up.
Castle race gear trial#
Finding the right gearing can be a lot or trial and error, but there are many advantages to having a proper gear setup. You would gear your vehicle one way if you want a lot of low-end power, like for a rock crawler, and another way for a super-fast speed run with a sports car. This is gearing in action, providing you with a mechanical advantage, whether you wanted to use as little effort as possible to get going, or wanted to get the fastest possible speed.Īside from the fact most R/C vehicles don't have the ability to shift gears, the concept is the same. If you stopped, however, and forgot to shift back to first gear, if was nearly impossible to get going at all in fifth speed from a dead stop. As you went through the gears, you were able to go faster and faster with minimal additional effort, reaching top speed when you shifted into fifth gear. When you put it in first gear, it was easy to peddle the bike, but you never got going very fast. Imagine that five-speed bicycle you had as a kid. The reason we use gearing in vehicles (both in real life and in R/C) is because of the inverse relationship torque has with how quickly something is spinning. There are some that believe 48-pitch and 0.6Mod are also identical, but that is incorrect - while they may be very similar, over time you will notice some wearing on the teeth where they don't fit together exactly right. It's worth knowing 32-pitch and 0.8Mod are pretty much the same thing and can be used interchangeably. There is also a metric variant on pitch, the module, and the common sizes there are 1Mod, 0.8Mod, and 0.6Mod.
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There are a few common sizes we use in R/C, such as 32-pitch (32P), 48-pitch (48P), and 64-pitch (64P). The tooth count is how many teeth are on the gear, and the pitch of the gear refers to the number of teeth per inch of the gear's diameter. When we start discussing motors, we'll be referring to the Kv of the motor, which is a short way of referencing the motor's RPM per volt applied to the motor (when spinning without a load). Gearing up refers to decreasing the gear ratio, and gearing down increases it.
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A differential is a collection of gears designed to allow two tires on the same axle to spin at different rates - check out this amazing video from the 1930s for more information on how differentials work I've never seen a better informational video.Ī gear ratio is a measure of how many times one gear spins compared to another one (something we'll get into later). The most common gears you can change on an R/C vehicle are the pinion gear, which is the gear directly connected to the motor's output shaft, and the spur gear, which is the main drive gear in a vehicle, and usually interfaces with the pinion gear (a pinion can also be a gear associated with a differential assembly, so make sure to use context to deduce which is being referred to). One gear doesn't really do you any good by itself, and if two gears have the exact same circumference, they don't help out much, either, so for our purposes, gearing will refer to a collection of gears of varying sizes working together toward a common goal. Everyone knows what a gear is, but "gearing" refers to the way that the individual gears work together to gain a mechanical advantage.
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