Me thinks, another runaway thread .... :)
.... All Hodgo is trying to do is give them a mental picture to work with when learning
Cheers
Mike
Printable View
Sometimes a mental picture can be very useful, even if it is technically incorrect. If what you are trying to do is encourage the right behaviour rather than trying to explain the technicalities of how it actually works, then a bit of poetic licence could be the way to go.
K1 Kayak paddlers are often told about the need for leg drive. Leg drive isn't all that easy to understand, but when a coach said to me recently that it should feel like pushing the clutch in each paddle stroke, it all made sense and I'm sure contributed to some of my recent improvement. Kayaks don't have a clutch, but the mental picture worked for me.
If the object of the exercise is to establish the right operator behaviour and the mental picture achieves that, does it matter if it is wrong? The important question at the end of this should be did they use the gearbox correctly, not did they understand how it was built.
I have too love you guys...............yeah, yeah this should work like that and that should work like that.
My truck licence was done in my own unit in the 1980s and with the second batch of females coming into the army system.......I was A RES.
That course was the best I had ever done.......old time instructors explaining things in laymans terms to women and got the messange across.
Some of the women were better than the blokes because they didnt know it all and pick up some finer points of information advailible.
In a army reserve situation the time frame to convey the information is much less.
For me it was MK3s and MK5s and then on to a twin boom wreaker and then a M816.
I was a prentice truck mechanic working on Leylands and Befords too.
I for a short while went to a transport platoon and they didnt reconise my qualifications because it was done at a unit level and had to do some of it again, but this time driving the new Macks and Unimogs.
that later course was by far of very poor quality even though it was done by a transport platoon.
My best driving lessons was on the inter twin booms towing another inter on the back , usually itself loaded.
Double shuffling the transfercase was the norm as well as the main box.
On the range the vehicle on the back could sometimes have a gun on it too if we had to clear the range quickly and another spare gun tractor was not advailible.
The M816 was interesting because of the over width, left hand drive , the trailer and vehicle braking systems...trailer often had a M113 on the back.
The M816 had the turbo removed for aust use as it was considered too powerful with it, so using the transfercase on steep hills was the norm, but luckly the transfercase was synco.
All this experience has held me in good stead over the years and made me a much better driver.
I note todays truck drivers have things much, much easier .
Modern trucks just have so much more power than the old ones and the gearboxes now, constant mesh or what ever is just so much easier.
I had a modern truck driver ( very experienced)in my Alvis stalwart the other day and the thing that showed up was the lack of understanding of wider gear ratios and the wider rev range of a petrol motor.
My old Studebaker 6x6 shows up modern truck drivers all the time, so much so I usually dont ofter or let them any more, to save my gearbox.
The old GMC/Studebaker gearbox being a usual shift pattern, a combination of sliding gear and sliding dog with a close ratio between 4th and 5th which requires good practice.
The other side of the coin and place me behind a road ranger and I suspect
I would have fun and games for a little while, because of my training.
Now for the technically correct types.
There is no such thing as a crash gearbox.
it is a corruption of the 1930s term of a clash and clashless gearbox
nope its a crash box...
cause "thats what usually happens when you miss a gear on a steep descent."
(no thats not serious)
we still need a sarcasm font.....
All I know if you stuff up a gear change and want the whole world to know about it , do it on a Two speed diff.