Alright so i have been noticing around this forum that we seem to never name gear ratios the same as the next guy. What i have always learned is that if you have a 12 tooth gear on the motor and a 60 tooth gear being turned by the 12 tooth gear then your gear ratio would be 5-1 it takes 5 turns of the 12 tooth gear on the motor to turn the 60 tooth gear once.
I have seen situations on this forum where this gear ratio would be called 1-5.
What have you learned?
~DK
I have always said it 1:5 when the 1 is powered by a motor and the 5 is driven by the 1. I’ve felt that it says the ratio in order from power to powered, that way if you have multiple ratios in one you can travel from the motor down the lines of gears to the driven axle, ex. 1:3->1:7= 1:21 or 1:3:7= 3:7.
I dunno that works for me i know it doesn’t work for everyone but it makes sense in my mind 
We just started calling the gears one pointer, three pointer, 5 pointer, 7 pointer.
It’s the number of teeth of each gear over 12 so you get the ratios. But this can be confusing to some new people.
The same thing also works for high strength sprockets, except that the divisor is 6 and the largest sprocket is a “5 pointer”.
My team usually uses driving gear:driven gear (i.e. arms are often geared 1:7). I like to think of it as the driving gear instead of the gear on the motor, because the first rendition of 254F had a rubber band powered drive to get its portable wall to the center of the field (it was geared something like (35:1).
Although when I researched this last time that it came up in the forums, I thought that I decided that it should be driven gear:driving gear…
That’s exactly how it goes. And for all that disagree with me, here’s something I took straight from the Vex manual:
“To find gear ratio, you just need to count the number of teeth on the ‘driven’ gear, and divide it by the number of teeth on the ‘driving’ gear.”
Yeah and when you write it out you can look at it as that number of spins of the driving gear to turn the driving gear that many times
~DK
Our team generally names gear ratios by Gear driven: Driving gear. So our drives are usually 5:3, arms are 1:7 etc.
I’ve heard people call it both ways, but once we started this way we just decided to stick with it.