Do companies allow you to choose your truck generally?

Covenant gives you a choice between a white truck with red and blue stripes, or a white truck blue and red stripes...

 

At least they offer you a choice.

 

Actually if you can drive your car (stick shift) without using the clutch then yes it will be just the same as driving a big rig. Practice by timing your upshifting so that it does not grind gears. When you down shift you will have to take it out of gear rev the motor slightly then time it just right to slip it into gear. Basically you are matching the speed of the motor with the speed of the car to make it work. Most seasoned drivers drive this way (without using the clutch) but in school you will first be taught to double clutch. Clutch in take out of gear let the clutch out, clutch in put shifter into gear. Downshifting requires like I said above, clutch in take out of gear, rev motor slightly, clutch in, drop into next lower gear. They will also teach you how to match your rpm's in accordance to your speed and gears.

This sounds like a lot but really isn't. Monkey's can do it!

 

Just listen to your instructor and you will do fine. We had an old guy in our class who said he had driven all kinds of trucks and construction equipment......he ended up being the worst shifter in the class......he insisted on telling everyone else how to do it, yet he kept missing shifts and could not get it back into gear to safe his life. He told us he had been dragging low boy construction trailers, yet he almost hit a fence and kept dropping the trailer on the shoulder. If you have one of those guys in class just blank him out and listen to the instructors and you will be well prepared to hit the road,

 

After 7 hours of driving on a straight, flat road, I actually look forward to something that will make me shift a bit. Keeps the blood in that arm!

 

I hired a driver once who supposedly had 16 years experience. I put him in a truck with a super 10. He said that he had driven one before. He could not shift without scraping the gears. If someone has driven for a number of years there is no reason that they should scrape gears. Most of us will scrape a gear now and then, but once a driver gets a little experience under their belt, they should rarely scrape their gears. Take your time and mesh the rpm's and you should not scrape any gears.

 

Ya this guy ended up with one of the bottom feeder newbie companies, in true fashion he played it off like it was his company of choice......based on all the applications he sent, I can assume it was the only company that would accept him...... from what I understand he is still giving advice to anyone who will listen.. lol

 

In a car you push the clutch all the way down to shift, if you do this in a truck and some how manage to get into gear, you will need to stop and pick up the parts of tranny you just lost

 

Wannabe here... and threads like this fascinate me.

As someone who's driven manual cars all his life, even a few where I could do it clutch-less, let me tell you... from the little experience I've had with big trucks, it could not feel more foreign.

A friend who was a CDL driver for the lumber yard I work for, let me drive his tractor on some back roads in our area one weekend without a trailer. OMG I was so bad at shifting.

Maybe part of it was the driver in me who wants to run each gear out to 5k or 6k in my little BMW, I dunno. After a few miles it got better, and for sure with some real training and MUCH more practice, it would have come pretty easily.

Just don't think you can hop in a big rig and "just do it."

Can you expand on this a little bit?

 

On trucks you just push the clutch down a few inches to disengage it. When pushed all the way down the "clutch brake" stops the trans from spinning (or "freewheeling"). You will be grinding gears like crazy driving down the road trying to shift if you push the pedal all the way down(providing you're ABLE to jam in into gear). Using the full pedal "throw" is usefull when your sitting there in neutral with the truck running and have to put it in gear.