Originally Posted by notfred
You could make it work the same way you make a double reduction gear work. You jsut have to package the whole thing inside that little housing around the cranks, which means you'd probably nead really narrow parts, especially since it looks like you might need a triple-reduction setup for a bike like that.
Of course!
Yeah, the key is to translate the motion at the axis of rotation, not the edge. As long as you're reducing through the edge only, any intermediate gears become nothing except frictional inputs. But when you tie a couple of gears together through their axis of rotation, voila, useful gearing!
Great! Someone get on it.