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Originally Posted by Adam Y.
Actually efficiency might not be an issue if you properly design the gearbox. A little bit of engineering and you should be able to get the efficiency fairly high. Of course a little research shows that the efficiency can reach 60%.
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I'm going to have to strongly disagree about efficiency not being an issue.
Even with your research, which I won't refute, 40% losses in a single stage of a gear set is still quite large compared to the 10%-15% losses over an
entire drive train with spur gears and chain.
It should be noted that Adam's article did cite a 97% efficiency for a multiple stage gear train using worm gears, which I found to be quite impressive. (Costs? Yikes!
)
Worm gears have their place, but I would strongly discourage their use on a drive train if you're just looking to reduce your gear ratio. I'd definitely like to see justification addresing the losses, which we can all admit are several times larger than spur gears.
(See Paul's link for an appropriate application.)
Matt