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#11
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Why am I still here?
On 1/9/17 6:02 AM, Mr. Luddite wrote:
On 1/8/2017 6:15 PM, Keyser Soze wrote: On 1/8/17 5:47 PM, Mr. Luddite wrote: On 1/8/2017 1:06 PM, Keyser Soze wrote: On 1/8/17 2:20 AM, wrote: On Sun, 08 Jan 2017 01:02:45 -0600, Califbill wrote: I pretty much gave up on stick shifts for daily drivers in 1968. I remember miles long traffic jams from Laguna Seca raceway via Gilroy of stop and go traffic. My leg would start shaking from the clutch work. And pulling a race car trailer. Later, drop it in drive, and enjoy power brakes. I still like actually driving my sporty cars. A slush box is fine in vans and trucks. I have worked very hard to avoid stop and go traffic. I worked midnights for the past 11 years I was in DC. It was great driving home in empty lanes on the beltway and watching the cars piled up going the other way. SW Florida was very rural when I moved here and a few tricks to avoid the trouble spots kept me moving right along most of the time. They did not have much in the way of computer customers in the tourist areas I grew up on stick shift vehicles and in the winter I earned a few bucks with my dad's jeep and plow. I always thought the stick shift gave you more control over what the wheels were doing and made stopping safer because you could more easily shift the vehicle out of gear. After my experience yesterday and today with the 4WD stick shift truck, I still think I am correct. Though we only got about 7" today of snow, I got through a couple of drifts two and three times that height (where the roadway was plowed) without problems. If you are doing some serious plowing, it's hard to hold the plow controller in one hand, steer with the other and try to shift if necessary. Auto transmission makes it a lot easier. Your plow must be more sophisticated than what we had. We had three levers in the cab of the jeep that controlled the plow hydraulics...up and down, side to side,and angle. I don't recall fiddling with them much while taking a run down one side of someone's driveway. No, same controls except I don't have "side to side" whatever that is. Up, down and angle, left or right. The control box is hand held however, not levers permanently mounted in the cab. I like manual transmissions in some cars/trucks. My Ranger had a manual as did a full sized '86 Ford pickup I had years ago but I didn't plow or tow with either of them. For towing and plowing ... especially towing, the auto is better, IMO, especially the ones they use in the full sized heavy duty trucks being the Allison in the GM's and Ford's Torqueshift. Both are designed for towing heavy loads. I saw an ad for the latest Ford Superduty F-350. It can be equipped to tow 33,000 lbs. Let's see ... other manual transmission cars I've had fairly recently include the '67 GTO (factory 4 speed), the BMW Mini Cooper turbo, and the Porsche (6 speed manual). The Mini Cooper was a fun car .. fast ... but whenever you really got on it, it tried to make a left hand turn due to torque steer. The BMW M5's were a different animal altogether. They had a hybrid, dual clutch manual that was electronically controlled for "auto" operation or you could manually control shifts with the stick or the paddles on the steering wheel. No clutch pedal though. I don't really have a need for the F-250 anymore but sometimes only a truck will do. My wife bought a little egg shaped, 20 ft camper last summer but it only weighs about 4,000 lbs loaded. She wants me to trade my truck for a smaller, compact like a Nissan or Toyota so she can learn to tow her little camper around. One nice thing about the F-250 was apparent yesterday morning when I made a Duncan Donuts run at 6 in the morning through 17" of snow. I had driven an auto Tacoma truck at a local dealer's, and I thought the tranny seemed to spend a lot of time searching for and shifting gears, but it seemed only a minor annoyance. Since then, Toyota has reprogrammed the auto tranny. When I was in the mood to buy, there were hardly any 4WD Tacomas around, and I ended up buying from a non-local dealer. I tried the manual tranny model before I bought and I enjoyed the shifting and the control it gave. The tranny does not shift as smoothly as a manual in a good car, but it is good enough. I don't tow or plow with this truck, so those considerations weren't an issue. In decent weather, I do haul a lot of aggie products for my wife's gardens and the lawn. If we lived in "da Souf," I probably wouldn't have gone for the 4WD. If you are going to tow a small camper in the future and want a Toyota truck, the larger Toyota model probably would be more suitable than the Tacoma. I don't know anything about the Nissans, other than the Toyotas seem to outsell them by a large factor. |
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