For RC cars, when we talk about speed and what needs to be done to push your car to the limit, RC car gearing is a main topic for discussion. RC gear ratios is a powerful tool to get the most out of your vehicle on the track or at home. Whether you want to speed past your friends or simply last for longer runs, the knowledge of rc gear ratios and understanding what needs to be changed or altered can and will directly influence your RC vehicle's performance.

RC gear ratios are how many revolutions a pinion has to make to turn the spur gear one time. When you have two gears, you will have a ratio. The example that RC Car Action uses is quite useful. If an RC vehicle has a 20-tooth pinion, or 20T, and a 100-tooth spur gear, or 100T, then the ratio is 20:100 for those gears. You then divide the spur gear's teeth (100) by the teeth on the pinion (20), which will give us a gear ratio of 5:1. This shows that the pinion must make 5 full revolutions to turn the spur gear once.

Another important thing to know and understand about RC gears are the gear pitch. A RC gear's pitch is the size of the teeth on the gear, but more specifically, the distance from a point on one tooth to the corresponding point on the tooth next to it. This means that a larger pitch value means that the teeth is smaller. Seems counterintuitive, but it makes sense considering how pitch is measured. Pitch is measured by the number of teeth that can fit around a disc that has a diameter of 1 inch. Another example RC Car Action uses ishow a tooth size that has 48 teeth on a 1-inch disc has 48-pitch. In comparison, if someone wants to fit 64 teeth onto a 1-inch disc, the teeth has to be smaller to fit the additional teeth, which means that the 64-pitch gear is finer than the 48-pitch ones.

Armed with some simple math and an understanding of how gears and gear ratios work, you can also race like the best and start to fine-tune your vehicles to perform at their highest level. If you want to see a more in-depth article (with pictures and diagrams!), check out RC Car Action's blog on gear ratios here.