Merry Christmas! I spent some time working out my idea for the mud gearing. I want to reduce the ratio between the the pedals and the tires, so that a full revolution at the pedals only turns the wheels by a fraction. This also increases the force produced at the tires by the same fraction. If, for example, I reduced the ratio by 2. The tires would spin at half the rate of the pedals, but would have twice as much force turning the wheels.
The common axle in the center is driven by the freewheels. The gears drop down 1:2 four times for a 16x increase in torque. The two sets of gears move at the same rate until the sprockets at the ends. All the gears in are equidistant, so we'd use the same sized belt at every junction.
As I was working on this, I thought about switching modes. Maybe the switch could happen just by loosening the set screws on the drive axle? Only one set of pulleys at a time would spin and switching modes only needs an Allen wrench. I think it could work. But I still want a more elegant solution.
Also, I got these in the mail yesterday.
They're adapters that let you mount freewheels directly on shafts. We definitely could've used this on Big Fish.
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