Juddian:
yourhavingalarf:
Reading all that…
Juddian, makes me feel I know nothing at all about gearboxes, that’s despite passing my class 1 in 1983 and driving everything from Volvo boxes to Eaton to Fuller Iveco yadder yadder yadder. 
Unfortunately, or maybe a blessing in disguise, my first artic wagon was a '72 build Foden S39 (early 60’s design), having Fodens very own 4 speed very constant mesh box with the 3 unequal split shifter mounted to the right hand side of what was amusingly called the dashboard.
Talk about a baptism of fire, no forgiveness in that box, no training either 
, miss a gear and you’d most likely have to come to a complete stop and start again because to recover you needed to know all the ratios and the various combinations due to that unequal split, no ramming a gear in as you could with most others in desperation, the box would throw the stick back at you and quite likely break your wrist for daring to, but seeing as power steering wasn’t a thing you tended to develop strong wrists quickly.
I exaggerate not, sadly, however finally getting the hang of that anything that came afterwards was a doddle or even a joy in comparison .
Not as i’d wish the same induction 
to the world of trucking on anyone else, different days.
If you search out poster S Maylefication on Youtube, he tests drives an 8 wheeler two stroke Foden with the same box, its a joy to watch him expertly handle that gearbox on the wagon they had recently restored perfectly.
Many years later my son has passed his artic test, he’s done a few agency shifts for supermarkets etc (agency not exactly forthcoming with the clients about his lack of 2 years experience 
) and one morning i get a phone call from him.
‘Dad i’ve got a Scammel Constructor 8 wheel tipper with a’, yes you guessed it, ‘Eaton twin split box, how do you drive it’…, i’m paraphrasing here, the wording might have been slightly more colourful at the time.
I gave him the rudimentaries and assured him it was the best thing could happen to him, yeah he played a tune on it for a week and hated it but on the second week it clicked and he still says he was glad to have had the experience because anything after that is a piece of cake.
i could never understand why manufacturers came up with the amount of gears they thought they needed , difficult to explain but in my christian salvesen days i had DAF come in with a 75 tractor unit , obviously it had the , i think 9 litre engine for about 300 hp , (this is early 2000’s i think) the company gagged for me to take it as a demo , so i asked the DAF man , ‘why has the 75 only got an 8 speed box then , when the 330/360 Cf’s i’m running have the 16 speed then ?’ he hurrumphed around for a bit so i added my next bit ’ you ever driven a low power motor at full weight then ? ’ answer ’ well no not really’ , well having been an afficianado of a c series ERF 250 ■■■■■■■ L10 at 38 tonnes (more if he could get away with it) 9 speed road ranger, i told him the lower the power the more bloody gears you need , he went away and so did the 75. we also had a meeting which included the volvo and daf sales geezers , i sat there while they waffled away , my question 'why is it that you both have the nearly same hp engine , same kind of torque , etc but volvo has an 8 speed , but the daf 16 , well that was another skip over an answer on that , but i’d had an agency night man completely trash a ZF on a CF as he ran it in low split all night as he didn’t know it had a splitter, i know , i know ,‘should have been explained to him’ but the night shift were up to their nads in work and it got missed. still i did once have the pleasure of 45 minutes attempting to get an agency man to understand a twin splitter , might as well have done the job myself, would have been quicker.
tony- i drive a pc now - with an ERF badge stuck to it
…total abuse by those who could not drive them. 
