This article is going to mainly pertain to ground vehicles, nitro or electric. We’re going to go through the gearing of these drive trains and figure out what all the numbers mean. You’ll learn the difference between a pinion and a spur gear, the important characteristics of gears you’ll need to know, and you’ll learn how to choose the right gears to get more speed or more torque out of your car or truck. Most of the concepts are easy to get on this subject, especially if you’ve ever ridden a 10-speed bike before. The same gear principles apply to your R/C vehicle.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a nitro vehicle or an electric one, the principles of gearing apply to both in the same way, the gears are just different sizes, that’s all. The biggest difference between the two is that sometimes nitro vehicles have two speed transmissions. In either case, however, the gear that’s mounted on the end of the motor or engine is called the pinion gear. It’s the smaller one that drives the bigger gear called the spur gear. Most cars or trucks are sold with gear sets that will give you average speed and average amounts of torque. Options are usually available up or down with both the pinion and the spur gear to give you a number of variations of gearing.
Two of the characteristics of every gear that you need to be aware of if you are going to make changes to your vehicle are the number of teeth, and the pitch of the teeth on the gear. The number of teeth is easy to figure out – you simply count them. Sometimes this number is stamped on the side of the gear: for example 52T for fifty-two teeth. The more teeth a gear has...More
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3 comments:
Thanks for the article! What material to do recommend for gears? Are their certain types to avoid?
Pinion gears are usually made from metal such as brass or steel. The Spur gear is usually made of plastic, and this is done for a reason. There needs to be at least one weak point in the drive system. If you replace the stock spur gear with one made of steel, you've just put the weak point somewhere else much harder to get to - probably the transmission or differntials. Plastic spur gears are cheap - $4 or so. Stick with the plastic, make sure the moto or engine is lined up properly and you should enjoy many hours of fun of tearing up the road.
-OTHS
Good tip, thanks!
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