
My favourite class in high school was physics, and it helped that it was relatively easy for me, but when we got to learning about torque I suddenly hit a subject that I really couldn’t understand, at least if there was any motion to the parts.
During college and grad school I finally managed to wrap my head around torque, but it wasn’t until I got my first job and had to work with it regularly that I really got it.
This two-part series is intended to help people understand power and torque and how to apply it as a sailor.
If this subject makes your head spin like it did mine, the good news is that, unless you want to design a lot of rotating parts, we don’t absolutely need to understand torque, particularly to go voyaging, other than to use a torque wrench properly.
But at the same time, it is a somewhat frequent topic in conversations, often with incorrect use, so it warrants demystifying (Part 1) and then going through when and how to use it (Part 2).