Quote:
Originally Posted by Schroeder
I'm not saying anything against that I just found it odd that in the country in which most private people drive an automatic car stick shift trucks are still going strong while here in Europe where most private people have stick shifts we have mostly trucks with automatic gearboxes (at least of the 50 something trucks the company I used to work for had about 45 were automatic and the rest some rather old trucks with more than a million km on the odometer).
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It's a torque thang. Only pussies drive an automatic transmission in a big rig.
As for that third pedal, it's only used when you stop and start. Other than that, you can float 'em with the tachometer and like Swampy says, never do it going up a hill. Once you've lost your peak torque at 7,000 RPMs, you'll have to stop and start over. I only did that once and it was enough to learn me.
With a button shift on a super ten, you might occasionally need to give the clutch a little tap to ease the shift into the next gear. Other than that, you just need to prep your shift by applying pressure to the stick, back off the hammer slightly and jam 'er quickly into the next gear. You only need to insure that the shift is made with the tach reading 7k RPM.
I used to have drag races from light to light against portable parking lots.
Going down a steep grade is another reason I liked the Super Ten transmission. You could drop a gear very easily without worrying about engine over speed and loss of any possibility of making a downshift to slow it down. I swear by the Jake Brake too.
Dropping off the mountain into Sacramento California was always a pain in the butt because they had signs prohibiting the use of your engine retarder, due to Billy Bob truckers running straight stacks with no mufflers and flipping on their Jakes in the middle of the night and waking up those sensitive golden state government types.
I still used mine because it had good mufflers and you could barely hear it.