Gear train
interconnected series of two or more gears in a machine
A gear train or gear set is a machine element of a mechanical system formed by mounting two or more gears on a frame such that the teeth of the gears engage.
Gear teeth are designed to ensure the pitch circles of engaging gears roll on each other without slipping, providing a smooth transmission of rotation from one gear to the next. Features of gears and gear trains include:
The gear ratio of the pitch circles of mating gears defines the speed ratio and the mechanical advantage of the gear set.
A planetary gear train provides high gear reduction in a compact package.
It is possible to design gear teeth for gears that are non-circular, yet still transmit torque smoothly.
The speed ratios of chain and belt drives are computed in the same way as gear ratios. See bicycle gearing.
The transmission of rotation between contacting toothed wheels can be traced back to the Antikythera mechanism of Greece and the south-pointing chariot of China. Illustrations by the Renaissance scientist Georgius Agricola show gear trains with cylindrical teeth. The implementation of the involute tooth yielded a standard gear design that provides a constant speed ratio.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gear train” is interconnected series of two or more gears in a machine. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gear, train and interconnected, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2644088. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gear train” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.