I wouldn’t dream of doing it in my old, and much loved Berlingo. It needed a new box some years ago and I bought a rebuilt one from a scrapper in Co. Durham. €350 delivered to France. But my mechanic, who put it in said ‘it won’t last, I’d get another one lined up if I was you’. So I bought another one for double the money in France. 8 years and 50,000 kms later it is still sitting strapped to its pallet in my shed.
The Peugeot Partner that replaced it is an auto (also been replaced once) which I needed to preserve my left knee and right shoulder, rapidly falling to pieces in heavy traffic while doing 85,000 kms/year.
My neighbour wanted to buy the Berlingo recently despite its almost half a milllion kms on the clock but I didn’t want to let it go, so foolishly, instead of telling him ‘not for sale’, I tried to put him off by saying €2,000 and no negociation. But he agreed , so I had to 'fess up and say ‘I don’t want to sell it and I thought that the ridiculous price would put you off’.
You think that the risk of transmitting torque and transmission loads through a partly engaged dog v gear hub, or pulling or pushing it out of, or into, engagement under any load, is a good thing they are only cheap easy to replace components.
If the manufacturer says declutch it when disengaging and engaging a gear that’s better than hearsay from some outback transmission bodgers and a yard labourer who thinks he can drive.
While which part was wrong about it being the re engagement of the clutch in neutral which synchronises an unsynchronized box, not the declutching used to prevent wrecking the dogs and gear hubs when disengaging and selecting the next gear.
Floating gears means snatching it out of gear into neutral during the break in torque when lifting the accelerator.That ‘break’ in torque will often in reality just turn into a reversal of torque load or at best still leaves a residual load through the gear train as it’s disengaged.
Similar applies when engaging the next gear.Although the gear train and gear set and dog speeds might all be well matched its still possible that drive line loads will be applied through the transmission before the new dog/gear set is fully engaged.
Fuller’s own driver instruction clearly states double( de ) clutch every shift don’t float gears.
Yeah?
Ok…I did not realise changing gears was SO complicated.
Well I just managed to hit every gear very smoothly, up and down the box quite succesfully every time, without using a clutch, …and definitely without overthinking it…and never had any problem, mechanical or otherwise
If I’d considered all that stuff everytime I changed a gear , my brain would have been exploding inside my head.
As with everything else in my (layed back) lifestyle, I apply things on a strictly what I NEED to know basis.
It’s less stressful, and makes for a much easier life.
I put 800000km on a Stratos with an Eaton twin split only using the clutch for starting and stopping on the original gearbox. Perhaps I was just lucky?
Could be wrong but is that not how it’s suppose to be driven
I remember a iveco i had with that gearbox it was a bit of a skill to drive it, you had to be shown, many a experienced driver I seen without being shown never getting past first gear
A mate of mine who had his own trucks rang me one day to do him a favour.
He’d sent a lad in to a factory near me to pick up an ERF hitch up and go.
The lad had got a couple of mile down the road and rang in to say there was something wrong with the gearbox as he could not change up the box…
Yep all he had driven was Scanias and Volvos before with synchro boxes.
I went out to him, jumped in the drivers seat, and set off.
He looked at me wide eyed as if I had just done magic tricks.
Not the lad’s fault, he had just never been shown, so I gave him a quick instruction and sent him on his way…
To a crescendo of creaks, revs, crunches, and grinding of gears.
I saw him a day or so later, when he told me he had it sorted…eventually.
To be honest it also took me a while to master it, and the owner of the truck was sat next to me…a 2800 DAF which I was going to do holiday relief on (depending on my performance) just after passing my test at 21.
In fact I just saw the same guy the other day (long retired) and we had a laugh about it.
Driving trucks in those days were a world apart from driving a car…unlike today.
I was a nervous wreck even after being shown how to drive it
At least on your own you could experiment crunching the gears but kept moving
I eventually loved it, i was getting comments from boss that my fuel consumption was fantastic, it was like everything else in life once you got use to it, it became natural
The irony being, the least experienced person on this site, without a single qualification is lecturing the highly experienced, on the internals and intracacies of a Road Ranger gearbox. Heck, Carryfast knows five tenths of SFA about a fifteen speed, thinking it is a splitter.
Not just in heavy vehicles either. I remember back in 1969 or so treating my 2 fellow taxi driver mates to a demo of clutchless changing in a Transit van we had hired to shift some furniture.
It was just for fun to prove it could be done though, I didn’t do it normally.
BTW yet another demo of stupidity on this site. Personal attacks are allowed to pass but using the universal abbreviation for Transit is a heinous crime.
There is a thread on it, (I’ve screenshotted the title) 1995 drought
I’m sure i went up and got some photos but they are in amongst the 1000s of others, i remember reading tank trailer prices rose considerably for a short period of time.
Obviously it can be done with either constant mesh.Or synchromesh in the case of the Transit without even bothering to match road and engine speeds correctly.Which not only can damage the gear dogs and hubs as you drag it out of gear into neutral and select the next gear under possible load, it can also totally destroy the synchronizers.
Ironically you can/could also take off from standstill with a synchro box without using the clutch by forcing the 1st or 2nd gear synchros enough to to actually transmit enough torque to move the vehicle up to sufficient minimum road speed needed to engage the gear.You could also force it into 1st gear at 70 mph if you really want to see what then happens next.
You obviously missed the point about the correct Fuller factory driver instruction use the bleedin clutch.
In addition to the the US description of double engagement of the clutch being as least as, if not more, valid, as a double disengagement of it, for the shift into neutral and for the shift into the next gear.
I didn’t miss anything, but you must have missed the bit about theory and practice.
I know how Eaton instruct drivers to use the gearbox, FFS I own a vehicle with the instructions glued to the dashboard. I also know the practicalities of changing without the clutch causes no real harm, confirmed by an “outback transmission bodger and yard labourer” both of whom have more qualifications than you. Mind, we’d only need a single, small qualification between us.
, so I had to 'fess up and say ‘I don’t want to sell it and I thought that the ridiculous price would put you off’. 
both of whom were successful enough to complete their apprenticeships.
