Gears are Special

Final drive of the Centurion, a British Tank

Gears are very special. Someday I would like to study the geometry of the hypoid gears used in the final drive of rear wheel drive cars. In my next life I hope to understand heat treating at a quantum level.

Update July 2026. Deleted the video from Allies at War, which has gone 404. I found several videos on YouTube that purport to explain what they found, but they were all just long narratives pasted over a slideshow of various WW2 scenes, none that showed any images of the actual problem. So I asked Google what the problem was with the Panther transmission and this is what I got:

Weak Final Drives: To speed up manufacturing, engineers used a simplified double spur gear system instead of a robust planetary gear system in the final drives. The gears easily stripped and broke under the heavy load.