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Originally Posted by dddriveman
I would love to take a look at that worm tranny. If you do not mind sending it to me. You can find my email in my profile.
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I don't want to jump in and be a nay-sayer... but I think one of the things you need to really weigh in before considering a design using a worm gear is the immense efficiency loss you're going to have simple due to the nature of the gear set.
We're talking in the range of efficiencies as low at 30%
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The advantage you mentioned, about not being able to back-drive the gear set, is not always true. There is some critical pressure angle and coefficient of friction that leads to the point were you actually can back-drive this gear set. Jim said that it's above a reduction of 50-1. I can't verify this either way.
[edit: But Paul definitely can. Rock on!]
However, simply because of the efficiency issue, I would steer clear of them in a drive-train gearbox unless there's a really good engineering justification. For a large reduction in a small amount of space, an off-the-shelf planetary gear set would probably hold better efficiencies.
That's my two cents. Good luck
Matt