On Sun, 04 Aug 2013 09:05:21 -0700, 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.
Transmissions are very tricky to work on; you were better off leaving
it to pros, because you need some special tools for many of them and a
pretty good knowledge of more mechanics than just turning wrenches.
The Alfa was straightforward but it was still a PITA. It's not
something I would have done if I wasn't a hopeless gearhead and
usually broke, between girlfriends and trying to make my sports cars
raceworthy.
And I broke a huge limb on a maple tree in my parent's yard hauling
out a Jaguar engine -- they weighed like sin. So I wasn't getting any
family help. g
--
Ed Huntress