Thread: How Does a Winch Work?
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Unread 11-01-2004, 20:36
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Re: How Does a Winch Work?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank(Aflak)
The van door motor has a worm gear built onto it. The thing about worm gears is that they cannot be backdriven, so it will accomplish the same thing that a ratchet would . . . except you can reverse direction with it, which you could not do with a ratchet unless you had a servo-powered release mechanism.

I don't know the specs for the van door, but I would assume that it has enough torque after the worm gear transmission to directly power a winch that can lift 130lbs . . if the spool diameter is small enough, anyway.

I'll look into that.
The van door motor can be back driven unless the bearing screw (at the end of the worm gear) is tightened quite a bit. The problems with doing this are:
1) You lose power output by tightening it
2) It wears out and you have to keep tightening it to keep it from backdriving

Plus it might still back drive if it sees excessive force.
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Warning: this reply is just an approximation of what I meant to convey - engineers cannot possibly use just written words to express what they are thinking.