18 speed mack

It’s rare I ever even split the high gears maxed out tonnage wise pulling a hill. I can climb gears all day long and haul ### up a hill. However, my pyro starts climbing above 900 pretty fast so I just keep her geared down and at a steady pace at about 1500rpm. Of course I have an older truck with a cat.
Where I find my 18 speed highly useful is if I’m at a red light half way up a big gear. Most would be stuck in 2nd gear all the way up, but not with all those extra gears down low. No missing shifts when you have a 200 rpm drop

 

Good question.

My answer is that any time you get in a new truck, set up as you describe, use ALL the gears when accelerating under X load. After that you can start figuring out if you can skip gears. Treat every new truck as if you have to use all gears until that fine lady indicates you don't need foreplay.

 

When I bought my truck last year, I never even driven anything other than an 8ll or a 10 speed. I figured I would just figure it on when I go to work. The first 3 days I didn’t even touch that splitter button. Then towards the end of the week, I figured I would split a gear or 2 on the high side just to get the hang of it. By the next week, I was a pro at it. But like I said, I don’t like to start splitting gears unless I really have to. I do absolutely no driving on the highway. I’m all local and go through too many traffic lights to be shifying all those gears. Moral of the story, just play around with splitting gears. Kinda sounds like you already know what you’re doing anyhow.

 

Don't split unless you really have to. Just wearing it out faster than necessary

 

When I was in the oilfield moving frac pumps around for US-Well Services they had a few t-800 with 18s only a few years old with under 100k on em and they were beat to crap from inexperienced drivers. So much slop in the drive line it wasn't even funny

 

That is a truck for a man to drive

 

Not suited for flip flops and a track suite lol