Right, that detaches a chair from the line. But sometimes they stop the motion of the entire line. Do they stop the motor, or do they disengage the bullwheeel from the motor?
A lot of the lifts are electric drive these days , so stopping the motor shouldn’t be a big deal. The power may come from a diesel engine driving an alternator if it doesnt have a power line connection.
That said I am sure older chair lifts and smaller rope tow units may well have a clutch and gear box, but I am guessing.
I’ve seen a ski lift with what it appeared to be it’s backup motor is a car (truck?) engine / transmission combo with a gearshift lever just hanging up in the air. IDK if they need to get up there and shift the transmission or just leave it in the gear they want, just engaging the clutch.
Also outboard motors for boats typically have forward and reverse, so 2 gears of some sorts. Since it’s liquid water one is pushing a clutch in not needed.
When my dad was young, a car engine with a car clutch. Same as was used to launch gliders, except I think glider launchers might have used a full gearbox.
A popular conversion for line-shaft lathes used an electric motor driving through an actual auto manual transmission - usually a 3 speed.
Virtually all modern lathes have a clutch often with two operating levers - one at each end of the lathe for quick use. It is to stop the spindle to change speeds, feeds or to measure the work using a micrometer, etc.
I had an Onan engine with a small automobile type clutch but just one speed, in and out. They were popular on oil “nodders”. It was nice as you could slowly engage the clutch just like a car to avoid jerks.
Having worked in sawmills & factories on & off sense the 1970s, I can attest that many of the old once-belt-driven machinery have/had clutches & many also have/had gearboxes. It is almost all electric today.
The entire mill or factory would be either steam or waterwheel powered. A large diameter main shaft running the length of the mill would be spun by the steam or a waterwheel. It was usually overhead so as to be out of the way. All of the separate machines were driven off of the main shaft by wide leather belts. To start or stop a machine one used a clutch which disengaged or engaged the belt wheel of that machine. The belt wheels always turned when the main shaft turned. Most of these machines, like the lathes, had multiple gears.
One small sawmill that I worked in had a 4 speed Muncie transmission to get the 8’ circular saw blade up to speed. It started in 1st gear & ran in 4th using 2nd & 3rd to get there. It was waterwheel powered.
One thing that took awhile for me to get the hang of was repairing & reinstalling the leather belts. Back before OSHA this was done “live”. The main shaft was only stopped at the end of the last shift, so when a belt broke & the repair was complete the belt had to be slipped onto the belt wheel with the main shaft turning. A bar or hammer/axe handle was used like a tire iron to pry the moving belt onto the belt wheel. It ls fairly dangerous. Many a millwright had/has scars +/or missing fingers from this procedure.
One of the factories that I have worked in here in Colorado has rows & rows of these old belt driven machines. None of these machines were manufactured in the 20th century nor the 21st century. The last time I counted there were over 6500 of the machines each of which has it’s own clutch. Each row has about 100 machines driven by one, electric motor driven, main shaft. Most of these main shafts are under the bench to keep them out of the way. The space under the bench has a guard system to keep people away from the main shaft. If a belt needs repair, the entire line is shut down & locked out before the millwright repairs the belt. Once the belt is repaired & installed, and the guards are in place, then & only then, is the electricity turned back on. This is one thing that OSHA got right.
Caterpillar tractors such as the D series, D-2, D-4, etc all had clutches & gears way into the 1980s as did almost all farm tractors. Most graders of that era also had clutches & gears. Interestingly the blades movements, up, down, sideways, & rotation all were controlled by clutches & gears on the early graders. It is all hydraulic these days. I would call these automotive, but the OP hinted in their 2nd post that they might count.
Some older carnival rides used clutch and shifter gearboxes with multiple gears. The ride is mobile yet does not move from it’s location so I’m not sure this would fit the Op’s requirement.
I’ve worked on the clutches of a few larger metal lathes before. On those machines the motor did not stop when the lever was thrown into neutral. It just disengaged the transmission/gear sets from the motor. When you want the (heavy) spindle to start spinning the possibly very heavy work again you do not want an immediate lockup. The shock would break parts and sling stuff. The clutch packs let er slip a bit till everything comes up to speed.
As clutches tend to do I suppose. It’s pretty close to the op described process.
Here’s a link to an archived article about a pretty amazing clutch though not from an automotive heritage.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140413140612/http://www.aviationweek.com/Blogs.aspx?plckBlogId=Blog:a68cb417-3364-4fbf-a9dd-4feda680ec9c&plckPostId=Blog:a68cb417-3364-4fbf-a9dd-4feda680ec9cPost:ecd93cec-3ad2-4ced-89e7-b166bda4b838
It absorbs 6,000 shaft horsepower (“SHP”) at idle = spin-up to lock-up, then once locked, transmits up to 29,000SHP.
Yes, all the posts here about lathes, shop machinery, etc, fit what I am talking about, and most definitely this example here.
This is on the edge of the criteria, but most agricultural tractors have PTO (power take-off) shafts used to drive the equipment they pull (balers, swathers, etc). I’m not sure if modern ones still operate this way, but the ones I used growing up on the farm had a two-speed PTO gearbox and clutch separate from the main drive transmission. So these are mobile machines with clutch and manual gearbox drive transmissions, with a separate clutch and manual gearbox for a separate driveshaft not used for locomotion.
Clutch and gearbox on a moving vehicle isn’t necessarily used to get up to speed. Most tractors historically, and many new tractors today, use a clutch and gearbox to accomplish matching the impedance of the engine to the impedance of the work. That is, the speed to torque relationships. But the idea is that the tractor is NOT IN MOTION when you change gears. You choose the gear you think will work best for a given task, and start out in that gear. Generally you keep the engine around some fixed speed like 2000 rpm and don’t vary it while working.
I have a New Holland WM25 that is now a year and a half old, which I bought new. It has 12 forward gears and 12 reverse gears. This is accomplished through three gearboxes that each have their own shift lever. One has three widely spaced ratios, one has four more closely spaced ratios, and one has two very close but not identical ratios except that the sign is reversed, which is what allows backing up. You multiply all three ratios together to get the effective gear it’s in. You think of the shifter for the four closer ones as the “gear”, the one for the three wider ones as the “range”, and the one whose sign changes as the “shuttle shifter” for going back and forth, which a tractor will do a great deal of when using the front end loader to move material. The shuttle shifter is under the steering wheel like the turn signal on a car.
On mine, 12th gear forward is the fastest, used for “roading” the tractor. Generally it starts out at full engine speed using the clutch, and stays that way. The speed is about 14 mph, not much for highways but it fees scary fast once you’re used to typical tractor work. This gear is about like 1st gear on my manual car, except that on cars engine speed is much more useful as a variable.
An indicator if the transmission on a moving machine is meant for getting up to speed, as opposed to adapting to the task, is whether it’s a synchromesh transmission. Such a transmission lets you move the lever from one gear to another while the vehicle is moving, as long as the clutch is in. Tractors typically don’t have synchromesh, so if you did want to change gears while moving (not recommended practice), you have to use double clutching to change the speed of the spinning engine-side clutch plate as an intermediate step.
Actually, there are other gearbox shifters, too. There’s one to engage or disengage the front wheel drive. There’s another to lock or unlock the pinion gears in the differential, which locks the rear wheels together. And there’s yet another for spinning the power takeoff shaft. But none of these are about matching speeds.