D
Douglas65
Guest
Another idea.
I have, and most of us have seen a drill press or mill/drill that has 2 sets of pulleys connected with a belt to change the gear ratios of the tool. Each pulley set has a big, medium, and small pulley attatched to it with a belt going to another set of pulleys that are small, medium, big. This is a very effective and I believe efficient way to transfer power and change gear ratios.
Switching gears is super easy once the tension is off the belt, and it looks like it "wants" to move to the next pulley much like a chain jumping to the next sprocket on sprocket cluster does. Taking tension off the belt would be easy if we were using an idler pulley for tension.
Weather you were shifting up or down, you would need to devise some method where the controlls were always making the belt jump to the next smaller pulley, which it always would be, either on the driving pulley or on the driven pulley -depending if your were shifting up or down. It should be a simple mechanism to take the tension off the belt and shift at the same time, kind like Large had in mind with the stick shifter idea.
OK, looking at what I just wrote, maybe that wouldn't be so easy, but I bet it would work well and be real smooth to drive. Also, maybe the belt tension could be set so that the belt would slip just slightly and therefore go a little easier on all the other components that were never designed to put up with an engine screaming at full bore.
Off to search the web for raw materials for this new idea...
I have, and most of us have seen a drill press or mill/drill that has 2 sets of pulleys connected with a belt to change the gear ratios of the tool. Each pulley set has a big, medium, and small pulley attatched to it with a belt going to another set of pulleys that are small, medium, big. This is a very effective and I believe efficient way to transfer power and change gear ratios.
Switching gears is super easy once the tension is off the belt, and it looks like it "wants" to move to the next pulley much like a chain jumping to the next sprocket on sprocket cluster does. Taking tension off the belt would be easy if we were using an idler pulley for tension.
Weather you were shifting up or down, you would need to devise some method where the controlls were always making the belt jump to the next smaller pulley, which it always would be, either on the driving pulley or on the driven pulley -depending if your were shifting up or down. It should be a simple mechanism to take the tension off the belt and shift at the same time, kind like Large had in mind with the stick shifter idea.
OK, looking at what I just wrote, maybe that wouldn't be so easy, but I bet it would work well and be real smooth to drive. Also, maybe the belt tension could be set so that the belt would slip just slightly and therefore go a little easier on all the other components that were never designed to put up with an engine screaming at full bore.
Off to search the web for raw materials for this new idea...