Casting Press

A gearbox designed using a worm and worm-wheel is considerably smaller than one made from plain spur gears, and has its drive axes at 90° to each other. With a single start worm, for each 360° turn of the worm, the worm-wheel advances only one tooth of the gear wheel. Therefore, regardless of the worm's size (sensible engineering limits notwithstanding), the gear ratio is the "size of the worm wheel - to - 1". Given a single start worm, a 20 tooth worm wheel reduces the speed by the ratio of 20:1. With spur gears, a gear of 12 teeth must match with a 240 tooth gear to achieve the same 20:1 ratio. Therefore, if the diametrical pitch (DP) of each gear is the same, then, in terms of the physical size of the 240 tooth gear to that of the 20 tooth gear, the worm arrangement is considerably smaller in volume.