Large motors and gears

We will be building a simple gear train with two gears powered by the large motor. The gears we are using are double bevel gears. Normally, when you think of a gear, you are thinking of a straight or a spur gear. The LEGO double bevel gear is essentially a spur gear in the middle, with beveled edges on both sides. Not only does this allow you to combine two double bevel gears aligned parallel to each other as we are in this section, but you can also combine them at right angles, as we will see later in this chapter. I chose this particular set of gears because they are included in both the Home Edition and Educational Edition kits. However, you could build a gear train like this using any set of dissimilar gears. The small gear has 12 teeth, and the large gear has 36 teeth. The motor will power the larger gear. We will find that every time the large gear spins once, the small gear will spin three times. So we are gaining speed, but at the cost of losing torque. This...