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I have a question for the professional drivers here. I've been watching "Ice Road truckers" on the History channel. Looks like some really hairy conditions with lots of steep grades. The drivers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time missing gears with lots of grinding. Is this common or is it a function of the particular tranny they use?

They've got guys that dress like women that they use?

Every truck is different so one needs some seat time to get the timing of a certain truck down. If you miss the first gear you pick, or pick one too high, then you are scrambling to find the right gear as the speed of the truck is dropping quickly. Sometimes you can chase gear after gear. Sometimes it is better to skip a gear and wait for the truck to slow enough to slip it in that gear.

You have to be a lot quicker shifting up a hill then on level road. When I drove redi-mix the risk was too high, so many times we just stopped at the bottom of the hill and picked a real low gear and climbed up. If one has nine yards of concrete on and misses a gear, and then you catch a lower gear and jerk it on a steep hill, you can puke a yard of concrete out the back in seconds.

We had one guy try to run up a steep hill and grab some gears on the way up, and he missed, then he missed, then he ended up grabbing first gear, jerking it, and then popped a wheelie. The front end of the rig wouldn't come back down until about three or four yards of concrete has spilled out the back.

I am not a "pro" driver, but i drive alot of different rigs and it looks like the are all driving super 10's. I HATE super 10's!

the chick is pretty hot too!

I been a CDL truck driver for 13 years.
I have driven lots of different trucks.
I find that when i am alone and having a more or less typical day my shifting is prety smooth. you may or may not know that except for starting from a stop most truckers with much experence seldome use the clutch.
When I get into a hairy situation and my shifting goes from somthing I just do without thinking about, to the for front I grind a lot more.
And when I have another person in the truck and I am in a different frame of mind, I get sloppy too.
I have watched that show , and they can have that job.
I made just under 60 grand last year pulling doubles and tripples around portland ore.
They would need to at least double that to get me to consider that stuff.
...tj3006

Once you get lost in the stick - you grind a lot. I am guessing the pressure of the job combined with the camera making you not concentrate as much as you should- a guy might get lost more than usual.

Or it could be over zealous foley artists in post production putting it in there because "everybody knows what a truck sounds like".

I think half that shifting,grinding is a put on for the camera, if they couldnt shift a truck properly chances are they shouldn't be driving there. real truck drivers can run those gears up and down in their sleep with no clutch. Don

Bet ya that ScottF could answer y'all's questions as he drives in the mountains near the west coast into Canada. I'll wait to see if he answers. There are thousands of miles of winter roads around my neck of the woods, and they are basically just tramped snow and ice, and the conditions are not great, and the hills have not been cut to a decent grade. I know several of these guys that truck through the hinterland of NW Ontario to the northern reserves, and they are real pioneers. Conditions up here can get dire in a short time at 50 below and no help for sometimes 300 miles.

I haven't watched it yet. The truck I'm driving now has a super 10 & yeah...it sucks...sometimes I find myself with no gear if I shift too fast...

I have watched that show , and they can have that job.
I made just under 60 grand last year pulling doubles and tripples around portland ore.
They would need to at least double that to get me to consider that stuff.
...tj3006 [/quote]

I had neighbour when I lived in Edmonton who did the "Ice Trucker" route for a few years. He easily made a years wage in a couple of months. It was a stressful way to make coin but a great way to make some "play money" then ran hiway the rest of the year for the family expenses. Had some nice toys funded that way. Last I heard was he long hauls only now.

The missed gears are 'stock footage'. If you watch close, you will see they use the same missed repeatedly. I can imagine the derector in the 'cutting room' saying "ok we have an uphill climb here, insert missed gear for (driver name here)".

The speeds they travel over the ice,they would never even get into the "HIGH SIDE" of the transmission not much shifting involved. these guys hardly have any weight on those trucks. in the early days of log hauling,with lombard and linn tractors hauling logging sleds on ice ,100 to 300 ton loads were pulled over lakes and ponds. Don

It's easy to get lost in the gears once you start spinning -- your truck is dropping speed like a rock, and your engine is revving the other way.

Thing is, a good driver might miss a gear, or two, or three, but he's not going to grind them audibly. He might hunt to find the gear, but he's not going to mash the gears. JMO, Dutch.

How does the gear changework on these trucks, is it a fairly standard manual box?

I used to drive a vehicle with 6 forward and 6 reverse gears in what was termed a "pre select box" which is a kind of semi automatic box...So lets say the box is in 4th gear as you were driving, you would guess which gear you would likely need next and shift the gear stick into that, but the box would change until you hit the "gear select pedal"...Of course you could be driving in 4th, have the gear stick in 5th expecting to change up, when the situation changed and you have to move it straight to third and then hit the gear select pedal!

Got quite interesting at times trying to remember which gear you were actually in and what was likely to happen when you hit the gear sector pedal!

super 10 does suck.But in an episode or 2 ago jack was teaching lisa how to down shift from 5th to 4th and she supposedly been on the road a couple years.Yeah some stuff on that show raises questions

They are standard straight gears (i.e. no synchro mesh). The book says you double clutch down (push in the clutch, take the box out of gear, let the clutch up, rev the engine, re-engage the clutch and drop into gear).

99% of pro drivers just "jake shift": i.e. we don't use a clutch at all. Just apply enough power to take the strain off the gears, remove from gear, rev up, wait for the gears to match, drop in gear, and re-apply power. Shifting up is even easier. Remove from gear as you reduce power, wait for the gears to match and drop into the next gear.

The box you drove sounds like a real nightmare.... JMO, Dutch.

Dutch,

Is there a reason they don't use synchrom mesh on those big gear boxes?

The preselect gear boxes are used quite a bit on tanks and other military vehicles ( I drove a Fox armoured car) and also were popular on specialist race cars like hill climbers at one time.

I think forthe Military, they do away with a conventional clutch and for a given weight/size, allow a stronger gearbox...

The "clutch" on the Fox I drove was refered to as a "fluid flywheel" and you could set the manual accelerator to something like 500 RPM, stick her in first (very low crawler gear) put the nose of the vehicle against a tree or similar, and the engine would tick over without stalling...

The gearbox was actually only part of the gearing; each wheel had a set of "sun gears" to provide the final drive ratios..they was a very complex bit of engineering and reputedly very few people fully understood how the gearing worked....

Regards,

Peter

They haven't found a synchro that would hold up to a million miles of 600 plus horsepower and 3,000 ft lbs of torque...... Lots of wear when you apply that sort of engine power to an 80,000 lb (or more) gross configuration.

Really, they just add complexity for no tangible benefit. For the new crop of drivers that have a hard time learning to shift (it's not that big a deal), they are going to the auto-shift transmissions (which is sort of like a paddleshift configuration).

Just give me my 13 speed. I will outpull and outshift any autoshifter, and I won't get stuck in the snow half as quick... FWIW, Dutch.

Most logging trucks around here just use a 8LL transmission 425-500 horse power, 3/4 locking rears with G.V.W. around 107,000 lbs legal wt lots of guys get 500,000 miles before clutch and tranny rebuilds. Don