Motorcyclists know that if, while underway, you gently roll the throttle on and off, you will feel a slight but hardly unpleasant ‘clunk’ as the backlash in gearbox engaging dogs is taken up in either direction. When I was 20, a very experienced dealer explained to me the motivations behind designing either more or less of this backlash into a gearbox.
In general, the gears in transmissions alternate between being splined to the shaft and being free-spinning. To lock a free-spinning gear to the shaft when it
