How to recover from lost gears?

That method revolves around "the 5's"

15mph - 1+5 = 6th gear
55mph - 5 + 5 = 10th gear

What I was taught is that when shifting at the "5's" you'd bring the RPMs up to about the middle of your range, our trucks are have rev limiters setting the max at 1500, so we'd bring the RPMs to 12-1300. 52 in our trucks would be 15-1600RPM in 9th or about 1000 in 10th.

From there you're taught to basically go high RPM above the '5' and low RPM below it.. so 49MPH would be high 9th gear (14-1500RPM) while 41 would be lower RPM 1100ish.

The purpose being to help students figure out how to downshift when they're still relatively new. This particular method never worked for me, it didn't help me out one bit. I learned the hard way, lots of grinded gears, lots of swearing, stalled it a few times too many.. a few hours of heavy traffic (95 is a great place for this) is what did it for me. I was pretty awful until I started playing in traffic.

 

Gotta feel it out

 

I'll do this Sunday as I will have a bit of time going and coming from the produce market.

 

ok to try to get more specific here's my problem. As an example I'm coming up on a highway and have to merge. I'm in 10th gear before the highway. I down shift to 6th with no problem to get on the ramp because of speed limit . If there is no traffic I can easily merge in 6th then up shift. The problem is there's always oncoming traffic and I have to downshift even more so this takes me out of high range. So maybe I'm moving at 10-15mph at this point. I'm obviously not at a complete stop. This is when I have trouble recovering, grinding gears like crazy. Recovering in high range like others have said is 'much more forgiving'.

I have to cross a bridge and when I go though ez pass lane I'm able to 'slide' it into 6th with no problem. I'm going 45 on the bridge then when I approach ez pass I'll start breaking then know that 6th will slide right in with a some rev. Sometimes the rev is higher or lower but I can usually down shift to 6th with no problem, sometimes it takes a couple shots but I'm 100% confident.

At my regular job we have a 5 speed Mack so I took it out this morning for a couple of hours. Had no problems at all down shifting. Since that ramp is near my regular job I took it for a spin there, had no problems at all.