Crank Definition - What it is, Meaning and Concept

The French word manivelle came to our language as crank .It is called, according to the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ) in your dictionary, to a stork or a handlebar.

A crank, therefore, is an element that has certain machines to confer, manually, a rotary movement .This means that the cranks are part of a mechanism that allows the transmission of movement.

Usually the crank is a metal piece that has two branches: one is used as a handle to operate it and the other is fixed to one end of an axis, so taking the crank by the handle and moving it is activated.axis movement.If an axis is linked to various cranks, it is called crankshaft .

The cranks can transform a rectilinear movement into a circular movement or execute the reverse process The so-called crank-crank mechanism , for example, is key in the internal combustion engines .In automobiles, the explosion of the fuel produces the linear movement of the piston , which is transmitted to the connecting rod and converted into a circular movement in the crankshaft .

The first gramophones , meanwhile, worked with a crank.These devices allowed to reproduce sound using a flat disk, which was placed on a turntable.A needle that traveled through the slots of the disc transmitted the vibrations to the tablet, which turned them into electrical impulses, which were finally amplified and projected.In the first machines of this type, a person had to turn a crank to spin the plate over which was the disk.