Tips and Tricks - Backlash

For this week's tip, we thought we would talk about backlash. If you google it, you will see that it is simply the clearance between the gear teeth. But in practice what you experience is when you push the gears, it applies force in 1 direction and shifts all the gears one way or the other just a little bit. When you flip the direction, the force all goes the other way. Usually, gears will turn better one way or the other completely based on the backlash. If you are putting gears together on your own, make sure they are perfectly spaced to limit the amount of backlash. You can read more about it on Wikipedia here.