for teams with arms

[Kevin Sevcik]

Well let's just see here.... Your average Honda Civic weighs 2500 lbs. Assuming a pulley with a radius of 6 inches, you have 15000 in-lbs of torque there. At max power, the CIM puts out 10.7 in-lbs. So you'd have to have a 1400:1 reduction there. You can manage this geardown however you'd like, but it looks to be around a 6-7 stage transmission, so you'd have some fairly large efficieny losses, but we'll just ignore that. Your CIM's turning at 2600 RPM, so it appears you'd be lifting the car at a respectable 6 feet per minute.

For the bored and impatient in the audience, you can do this quicker with a straight energy calculation. Power = Force * Speed. Peak power = 337 Watts = 14913 foot pound-force/minute. Force = 2500 lbs. Thus, Speed = 14913/2500 = 5.9 feet per minute.

And the ratcheting mechanism wouldn't have to be beefy at all. If you put it at the first stage of the tranny, it only sees as much torque as the CIM does. Of course it'd have to ratchet at 2600 RPM, but still. You could put it a stage or two down, and it still wouldn't be that bad.