had my first lesson today with the tractor trailer

the first day of class I thought I would never get it but Im pretty smooth with it now... miss a gear everyonce in a while on a downshift for some reason... always seems to be from 6th to 5th

 

Wait till they put a loaded trailer behind you......the learning continues.

 

We are hauling half loaded trailers and we do get to do short pickups and drops of loaded trailers I am really impressed with this school. Its not just a "mill". I couldn't have asked for a better instructor.

 

think about it in a precision sort of way, i get obsessive about how my shifts are...

i have found that when you double clutch you have to be alot faster. and remember you dont have to press the clutch in but a couple of inches, go to far and its hard on the clutch brake.

i highly reccomend against floating in a synchro box as well. a truck uses something closer to a "dog clutch" instead of synchro's

 

But at the end of that trip, I knew how to shift fer sure! Now I can downshift from 8th to granny low quicker than I can brake a car. Sometimes, real world practice can do wonders for your learning.

 

If you want to "speak in the nerd person" (gotta love urbandictionary) they're called sliding clutch gears and they're similar to a drive dog that a diff locker uses to mate the ring gear carrier to the axle that passes thru it. A synchronizer surrounds the clutch gear and rubs against the main shaft gear and speeds it up or slows it down accordingly when the driver attempts to shift into a gear. So basically, it has to change the rotational speed (nerdspeak again, sorry) of not only the gear that the clutch gear is engaging, but the countershaft, pressure plate and clutch disk as well (through the pilot shaft). Since "big truck" trannies have two countershafts, that's a lot more momentum to overcome, making full synchronization impractical. It could be done, but the result would be a transmission so long and heavy (from the extra parts) it would be a tight fit in a lot of today's trucks. Have I put anyone to sleep, yet?

 

nope, i just couldn't figure out how to explain it as well as you did!

 

Chill out and relax. I've got 38 years and well over 3 million miles and every once in awhile I miss one.... usually in front of a bunch of people.

Anybody that's "teaching" you to float gears is a ####. Right now you need to learn to double-clutch period. Floating gears is fine for the Swifties or somebody "boulivard cruising", but get into that habit and someday you're gonna find yourself goin' backwards down a steep hill 'cause you can't get it into the lower gear. This is a "Billy-Big-Rigger" stunt.

Forget all this "what I do in my half-ton" or "what I do in my car" stuff. You're supposed to be learning to drive an 18 wheeler fer pete's sake. You wanna drive a "widdle twuck", go do Hot-shot with a one-ton. You wanna play with the big boys, listen to people that actually know what they're talking about.

There are no short-cuts, no "almost good enoughs", no "I know better than the guys who've been doing it all their life" in this business. That's one big reason we "oldtimers" look askance at the "driving school" crowd. They're always looking for the "Easy" way, doing something dumb and making the rest of us look bad when their wreck makes front-page news. Settle down and learn to do it right. Realize that your school is only gonna give you the basics and not much of that. When you "graduate" is when you really begin the lessons. That's gonna take years and never really stops. Driving a big-rig is like playing with a grizzly bear; get careless and it will eat your butt.

Just think; yer gonna learn things like split-shifting, skip-shifting, Georgia Overdrive, driving outa a jack-knife, driving on black ice, driving in a white-out..... all kinds of good stuff.

Have I got your attention yet newbies? Good; then quit futzing around and get with the program. If you're cut out for it, you'll positively amaze yourself at what you will learn. If this all sounds too rough for you; go home and knit.

See ya on the big road.

 

Please tell me what school that was so I don't go there!!!

 

The biggest "habit" I've had to overcome is pushing the clutch in too far while shifting into a gear. Took me a while to train myself to push the clutch in only an inch or so rather than half-way to the brake.

That alone made quite a difference.

The other thing that helped a huge amount was finally listening to folks who said (as some have here) that there's a rhythm. The driver who mentioned the wacky idea of the Adams Family finger-snaps is (for me and my truck) right on.