On Sun, 04 Aug 2013 08:16:56 -0700, George Plimpton
wrote:

On 8/2/2013 7:56 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
SAE's online operations produce some good videos of mechanical
operation of car parts. Here's a video on contemporary manual
transmissions (conventional) that they link to at DriveLineNews.com.
If detents, synchronizers, blocking rings and clutch cones are a
little vague in your mind and you want to see them in action, take a
look at this.

http://drivelinenews.com/videos/manual-transmissions/


I've driven nothing but manual transmission cars since 1971, and I
didn't find that video at all helpful in understanding the inner
workings of a manual transmission. It also was odd that most of the
driving footage showed vehicle traffic in Great Britain or Australia,
although the narrator had an obvious American accent.

This multi-page site doesn't have the nifty video, but it helped me make
much more sense of the workings of the transmission.
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/transmission.htm

If you don't know how a synchro manual transmission works, that video
I linked to isn't going to help you. As I said, I linked to it for
people who DO know how they work, but are a little vague on the
relationship of those parts.

People like me, for example. I last had a manual transmission apart in
1969, when I took the synchro rings out of my Alfa Romeo to make it a
poor-man's racing crashbox. That was a common work-around for
low-bucks racers.

I knew how all those parts related then, but it's been a long time,
and the video refreshed my memory.

--
Ed Huntress