Twin Stick Transmissions

After 35 years of banging gears I will take Auto shift every time. I absolutely love the auto shift transmissions available today. I move trucks piggyback out of San Antonio, TX and I drive all new trucks. Many of them come with auto shift transmissions these days and they are very reliable. You can place the switch in auto or manual shift. You know it's funny but you can always spot a new driver belly aching about how automatics are unreliable or getting excited because he has just been assigned a truck with a 13 or 18 speed transmission. Then even though he/she has only 20,000 on board they feel a need to go through every single gear. LMAO I think we all used to be that way.

While we are on the topic, you know it's funny but you simply can't compare today's trucks to their predecessors. Modern new drivers have no idea how easy they have it with their walk ins and everything else on board these days. They are as different as a DC3 aircraft and a commercial airliner. When I was about 22, one of the first trucks I drove back in '80 or '81 had a duplex or sometimes called a twin stick. You had two shifters; The main and the auxiliary. Today, they are bundled together in the same box, roughly speaking, with the two gearshifts replaced by the shift lever and a hi-lo range selector, roughly equal to today's 9- or 10-speeds. Now, let's see if I can get this right.

First gear on the main box, low then into high on the auxiliary. That's the easy part. Next, shift the main into second, but before engaging the clutch, you pull the auxiliary out of high, rev the engine, slip it into low and engage the clutch. Now you're in second low. Depending on the load, you might have to do that all the way up through the gears 'till you get to top speed. More likely, you'll cheat and run through a few gears in low before you have to start splitting them. It only gets worse when you get into the 3- and 4-speed auxiliaries; today's 13 and 18 speeds.

Shift timing had to be impeccable, and good drivers could often skip shift and even split odd gears. If you missed a shift, it would bite you but good. The teeth on the gears were spaced pretty widely apart, so there was a good chance that a partially engaged gear would kick the shifter back. If you were lucky, the meaty part of the palm of your hand took the brunt of it. Drivers have had wrists and fingers broken by the kickback.

If you happened to miss a split shift, you wound up in what they called double-nothin' -- both transmissions in neutral. That often meant a full stop to get the thing back into gear, though some of the drivers made claims to finessing them back into gear, if they could remember which gear they were in. Personally, I haven't seen this done without a very unhealthy grinding of the gears. You may have seen pictures or heard stories from older drivers about drivers with one arm wrenched through the steering wheel gripping a shifter while the other arm grapples with the other stick. God forbid you happen to hit a pothole at that moment, because the big steering wheel with all its leverage could whip around and easily break an arm.

Ahh... the good ole days!

 

A screaming Detroit. Operating range was up to about 2600 if I remember correctly.

 

LOL I remember the 16 speed Spicer. If I remember correctly, I t was an H pattern and you had a selector button on the shifter with 4 positions. Right?

Update: I found this video.