Trouble double clutching smoothly?

Yeah, they gave us the "if you already know how to drive a manual, forget everything you think you know!" speech. I could see why folks say that BUT I think the skill sets aren't as dissimilar as it's made out to be. For me the biggest thing is understanding clutch pedal travel needs to only be about half of what I'm used too. As I said above, a big part of getting that right was actually getting my seat adjust properly so I wasn't naturally throwing my leg the full length. That adjustment helped A LOT!

The other thing is getting used to really smashing the throttle down and waiting what seems like forever vs my car for the rpms to come up on the rev match. Truck engines are a different animal than the aluminum flywheel mated DOHC v8 in my Mustang! I'd never ride the throttle as long or as hard in my car so I've had to learn to ignore the "OVER REV!!!" warning buzzers going off in my head.

There were important things that carried over though. Two of them I found helpful was understanding the "standard - H" shift pattern. Our instructors have spent a good bit of time explaining the "soft wall" vs "hard wall" of the shifter b/c people who are new to standard shift have trouble finding second and third gear. A lot of them think you have to move the shifter over from 1st to second and overshoot ending up in fourth. I didn't really have that problem b/c I already know the shifter will fall into the middle of the H between and second and third once you pull it from first ( or any other gear for that matter ) and just let it move to neutral naturally. The just push straight up or down to hit the middle gears.

The other thing I found that was an advantage to already knowing how standard shift works was understanding every clutch has an engagement point and even when you get into a knew truck it's a pretty quick muscle memory exercise to figure out that pick up point and smooth out modulating the clutch especially on take offs. I got a lot of complements from our instructors and other class members for having the smoothest clutch engagement and take offs even when we were practicing backing maneuvers. I tried to explain how figuring out the pick up point of any truck your in and managing momentum is to your advantage. Some people got it but most of them didn't. I guess it's just a practice and familiarity thing but I think it is something that adapts pretty readily from driving a standard shift car.

Yeah, they gave us a road speed chart and I think it's bs too! For one thing I think it trains people to spend FAR too much time looking at the speedometer and trying to get to a certain mph rather than watching the road! And you'd be doing it often at a time when you're slowing down to come stop which is exactly when you need to be paying attention to your spacing in traffic rather than staring at the dash. Most people who are good at driving a manual shift of any kind do it all by sound so they can keep their head up and eyes on the road.

 

Yeah, we talked about "floating" the gears. I can actually do it in my Mustang sometimes. One of our instructors actually told us that 9/10 professional drivers do it that way but you can't do it on the road test b/c the testers consider it not properly controlling the vehicle. I don't get it personally, seems like you actually spend less time out of gear by floating but whatever. Gotta do what you gotta do to get over the next hill!

 

LOL! "Fake floating"