Personally I think I need a heavier flywheel.. You know to stop those
embarrassing stalls when taking off from a light when I'm driving the wife
around...Bob
> In speaking of rotating objects, mass isn't as important as the moment of
> inertia is. The moment of inertia takes both the mass and the
> distribution of
> the mass into account. If the flywheel could be approximated as a flat
> disk,
> I = .5*mass*radius^2. If we really wanted some improvements, reducing the
> radius would be the way to go! Of course that really wouldn't work...
>
> So the thing is, just because something is heavy doesn't necessarily imply
> that the moment of intertia is large because the radius of rotation could
> be
> small. Relative to the radius of a flywheel, the radius of the driveshaft
> is
> very small.
>
> Having said that, removing the possibility of harmonic vibrations could be
> benefit enough in installing a lightened flywheel (I guess depending on
> what
> RPM the vibrations occur at). I would have to think the ligher flywheel
> would
> also offer some performance improvement, however the performance to $
> ratio
> could be well debated (as it has been!)
>
> Steven Altomare
> 74.5 without a light flywheel
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