On Sunday, August 4, 2013 9:05:21 AM UTC-7, George Plimpton wrote:
On 8/4/2013 8:42 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:

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.



I never did much automotive work. I learned to do a little more than

basic stuff on cars I had in the 1970s, all of them Japanese four

cylinder engines. I could do a tuneup including valve adjustment, I

rebuilt the carburetor on a late 1970s Honda Civic, and I could do a

fair amount of disassembly and reassembly/replacement of things on the

outside of the engine. I never got into the internals - didn't have

enough interest to learn what I was doing, and figured I'd wreck it and

have to pay someone more to fix my wreckage than if I had just paid a

pro to do the work in the first place. However, I did always wish to

know how a manual transmission works, but never quite enough to look

into it very much.

It's no surprise to me that The Pimple has little or no mechanical talent. He's proved that for years in this newsgroup.