Depends on the angle of the worm. If it is shallow enough, a worm gear will not back-drive; the gearbox will lock up (or break something) if you attempt it.
Perhaps you need to give the rest of us even the slightest indication of what you are attempting to do.
What I want is to drive the worm using the worm gear, or to find a similar mechanism, to that of the worm gear. Is there any other way of transmitting power, so that the direction of motion of power transmission is similar to that of the worm gear?
So you want to have an output shaft at right-angles to the input shaft? Bevel gears will do that, too.
Do you want it to act as a speed-reducer, or a speed-increaser?
Worm gears will work as speed reducers (in which input torque is applied to the worm, and output is taken from the mating gear) but they are not good in the opposite direction. Efficiency tends to be poor, even when used in the normal direction.
It would still really help if you gave us some idea of the application. Are you building a watch mechanism, and you need to translate the motion of the finger operated wind-up knob 90 degrees to wind up the spring? Or are you building an ocean-going vessel, and due to the orientation of the engine and propeller, you need to transmit 100,000 horsepower at 90 degrees to turn the propeller? Or somewhere in between. Explain yourself.
Thank You so much for your time, I had this vague idea of transmitting the motion of a cycle to generate power. I thought maybe if I could simultaneously transmit torque from both the front and the rear wheel to a single shaft I could reduce the losses due to transmission. Just got to think of it in another way I guess..
I may be misunderstanding the application here, but why do you need to take power from both wheels? I would have thought one on its own (probably the front) would be able to gather all the power available.
How much power are you hoping to generate? If you're only after a few watts, you can already (for the last 70+ years) get hub-mounted alternators that might allow you to dispense with gears, worms and shafts altogether.
Hmm.. well I've not thought of its yet, I'm still doing my literature survey. Hoping to generate a much power as possible. I mean like, if we could combine two or more riders in series to a single shaft we can generate more power than a single rider, but the issue is the varying speeds of each rider.
What is the aim here? To extract shaft horsepower from the efforts of a collection of pedallers (if so, is there an actual requirement for them to be racing off over the horizon, or is it OK for the equipment to be nailed to the floor?) - or is this about sucking kinetic energy out of a moving bike (energy which might have passed through the pedals, or might result from having started at the top of a mountain) - a sort of regenerative brake?
When you were talking about wanting to extract power from both wheels, I thought you must be talking about the second of these things, but once you start invoking multiple riders, I begin to wonder.
You probably don't need to worry too much about the "pedalling at different speeds" problem - that's one of the many things that's been done 'manywheres' and at many times.
I'm referring to a stationary bicycle, yes, to simply convert kinetic energy to electrical. I thought maybe a collection of peddlers would be effective than a single peddler. How can we tackle this speed variation, I mean if we just use one single shaft as the output shaft.
Why not 1 alternator/generator per rider, combine and condition the electric power as required for the application. This is easily extensible, and partial capacity (say 1 of 5 people pedaling) operation still takes place at design voltage and parasitic loads are in proportion to the driving power. The electrical power combination would be simple junction boxe(s), or even just Edison plugs.
Mechanical combination to feed a larger alternator/generator does not have these plusses, and adds the concerns related to exposed shafting, power combination and other stuff.
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