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Hack

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Funny, if back in the day when most of us were driving manuals you plopped down a modern A10 transmission we all would have crapped ourselves and then lined up with cash money to get one. It would have been a magical thing really.

So, for someone who has shifted gears a billion times, for my 2020 I went "pussy version" (as one of my buddies put it). Snort!

I do have a question for the kids who drive manual, do you double-clutch any more or is that not needed with the new nanny manual transmissions..? :sunglasses:
Well, if they had an A10 available for a 1970s car, the transmission would cost more than the entire car. Needlessly complicated and overkill is what people would have thought. It would have been available in a Ferrari or a Bentley - maybe - but definitely not a Ford.
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sk47

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Needlessly complicated and overkill is what people would have thought.
Hello; Yes to this and the comment about the extra cost of the additional complexity. It is not that there is no benefit at all from having a greater range of gear ratios, because there is a positive benefit in some situations.
With automatic transmissions a case might be made for one of the four speeds which has a lock up feature as being good enough for most situations. Not the latest technical achievement for sure, so not something to brag about in ad's.
I have driven the very old two speed automatics and did not care for them. Most of the automatics have been three speed types and they were satisfactory for driving but were not so fuel efficient.
My current pickup has a four speed automatic which locks up. Gets some better MPG than the last manual pickup I owned (a 1989 Ford F-150 with the 300 inline six) Most of the time it has no objectional quirks. I drive in the low mountains of Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia and sometimes the downshifts on an uphill grade area bit harsh, but hot as bad as one of the older three speeds.
I have only test driven one of the ten speed autos in a new F-150 on mostly flat road so cannot say if having six more gear ratios is the better driving experience. The additional gears may make driving some better. May make more MPG possible. May shift quicker and give quicker elapsed times. Give me all of that at the same dollar cost and with the same reliability as a proven four speed and I am good.
If the ten speed adds a lot of cost to have, then give me the older four speed which I can live with for less money.

If the choice was still available a manual in a pickup would be my pick. My last F-150 had a five speed manual. Now not an option in a light duty pickup. However for the time being I can get a manual in a few cars and will if I can manage it.
 

Norm Peterson

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Well, if they had an A10 available for a 1970s car, the transmission would cost more than the entire car. Needlessly complicated and overkill is what people would have thought.
For sure. At the time, we were just beginning to see 5-speed manual transmissions and 4-speed automatics, and people were questioning whether we even needed that many forward gears. I know that for my Dad (b. 1920), only four for a manual transmission was "too many".

For most cars, a wide range of speeds and conditions can be accommodated with only 6 forward gears. Anything more than that - again this being for most cars - is going to be more about eke'ing out little scraps of fuel economy improvement than mechanical usefulness. Perhaps as you close in on an honest 200 mph capability, another gear might be justifiable from a purely functional point of view.

Much more than 6, maybe 7 gears is going to get too busy to keep up with manually and would tend to feel like 'hunting' if done automatically and the shifting was at all noticeable. That said, 8/9/10 speed 'conventional' automatics are still more robust solutions than the CVTs that they're apparently trying to emulate, particularly in a performance-oriented car.


Norm
 

Aaron1085

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I got one of these a couple of years ago and did not care for it. It was too short for my tastes and for some reason after a couple of hours of hard driving in the mountains the trans did not want to shift until it cooled back down. That problem went away once the OEM shifter was swapped back in.



I did this at the same time and it is still in there. Can't say there is much difference.

In retrospect I did not have any real issues with the OEM trans or shifter and still don't. I just thought I would try something different based on forum members here swearing this or that was so much better. Different is not always better and that includes some people's opinions.
that Steeda manual transmission bushing ‘kit’ looks nice. Would you say you have enjoyed the difference from OEM, or is it negligible?
 

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Aaron1085

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it's a MUST do.
sorry, can you just explain a tad more ; just firmer shifting overall? I have never been a ‘short throw’ guy, so this looks like a nice add without swapping out the entire shifter.
 

shogun32

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the shifter action is more stable/predictable. Maybe you can call it 'firmer' but the win is the shifter doesn't fight you when you shift at higher RPMS or want to select gears faster. It doesn't change the length of the throw in any discernable fashion.
 

sk47

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For most cars, a wide range of speeds and conditions can be accommodated with only 6 forward gears.
Hello; While there are more, here are two situations where lots of gears are useful. One is where the power band of an engine is narrow. Say an engine tuned to make peak HP or torque that only makes that good HP/torque in a small range of RPM's. I had a two stroke motorcycle like that. It was a Suzuki 250cc twin road bike. Made good power only for a few hundred RPM's. It had a six speed trans so I could usually find a gear to keep it in that range.

The other would be a small displacement otto cycle (4-stroke) gasoline. A car which is close to being underpowered or actually is underpowered. I have had a couple of those sorts of cars. A couple more gears would have been nice.

With cars such as the V-8 Mustangs power is not the big issue. A four speed would do, they did for a few decades. To me a five speed is plenty good enough for most cars. Three underdrive gears, a direct drive 4th gear and an overdrive 5th.
I have not yet spent much time in a six speed manual. Only test drives so far. I do think a six speed manual could be the sweet spot in terms of the number of gears. A bit hard to pin down just how the ratios ought to be. In a Mustang V-8 I might like three underdrive gears, a direct drive 4th and overdrive 5th and 6th.
In a car with a less powerful engine perhaps four underdrive gears, direct drive 5th and an overdrive 6th for cruising.
 

Norm Peterson

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Hello; While there are more, here are two situations where lots of gears are useful. One is where the power band of an engine is narrow. Say an engine tuned to make peak HP or torque that only makes that good HP/torque in a small range of RPM's. I had a two stroke motorcycle like that. It was a Suzuki 250cc twin road bike. Made good power only for a few hundred RPM's. It had a six speed trans so I could usually find a gear to keep it in that range.

The other would be a small displacement otto cycle (4-stroke) gasoline. A car which is close to being underpowered or actually is underpowered. I have had a couple of those sorts of cars. A couple more gears would have been nice.
I did say "for most cars" . . . so yes I realize that exceptions can be found.

But there are always other constraints. An underpowered car isn't going to be able to reach speeds where still taller transmission gearing would be necessary or even useful. Once you've got one gear that can't add any more speed, there isn't much point in having any more that can't. Might as well space that one away from the rest and only use it for relaxed cruising, pretty much what 1.00 5ths and 0.6x 6ths are giving us as it is. But there are other gearing philosophies . . .

And there's always the matter of how busy a driver is willing to be with his shifting. Gear spacings that are averaging less than 1.2 to 1.00 apart would be ridiculously close for normal driving where you're typically shifting at 3000 rpm. Manually shifting every 5-ish mph between 25 and 50 would be nuts. Sequentially shifting a bike with ratios that close is one thing, only involving small movements of the wrists, fingers, and left ankle. In a car, it's whole right arm and at least lower left leg movements which involve bigger and slower muscles. I can't imagine this not mattering for most people.


With cars such as the V-8 Mustangs power is not the big issue. A four speed would do, they did for a few decades. To me a five speed is plenty good enough for most cars. Three underdrive gears, a direct drive 4th gear and an overdrive 5th.
Four was "enough" until the speeds that cars could reach got past about 125 mph. "Enough" in quotes because for the most part we didn't know any different.

You need a short enough 1st to easily get off the line with minimal clutch slippage and there is a limit to how wide you can space the gears before you make the engine fall out of its powerband on the upshifts. Performance driving implies closing the ratios up so that you can take maximum advantage of what the engine has to give you, so the more you focus on performance (and have enough of it available) the more you're going to want more than four. Drag racing is kind of a special case in that time and distance matter more than speed and there isn't enough room to get much past what four carefully chosen gear ratios can give you. Hell, big-power automatic guys are still running 2-speed Powerglide-based transmissions.

Five is enough until you start driving at the higher speeds, and I can tell you that the big gap from 4th to 5th in my S197 at 120-ish mph makes the car fall flat. Taller axle gears (3.31 or numerically smaller) would perhaps solve that, but hurt driving off the line and at slower speeds. Truth be told, there's also too big of a jump from 2nd to 3rd as well, that makes 2nd too low to be useful in many track situations and not worth downshifting into. This gets into gearing philosophies; the 3650's ratios are perfectly adequate for most normal driving. Not so good for more serious performance driving.


I have not yet spent much time in a six speed manual. Only test drives so far. I do think a six speed manual could be the sweet spot in terms of the number of gears. A bit hard to pin down just how the ratios ought to be. In a Mustang V-8 I might like three underdrive gears, a direct drive 4th and overdrive 5th and 6th.
In a car with a less powerful engine perhaps four underdrive gears, direct drive 5th and an overdrive 6th for cruising.
I've driven 3-speed MTs, 4-speed MTs, 5-speed MTs, 6-speed MTs, and one 7-speed MT (that I never got to use more than four gears of up to about 100 mph on the track).

I can agree that for most average/normal "performance cars", 6 is a reasonable place to stop adding gears. The extra gate required for a 7th in a conventional H-pattern shifter isn't without the potential for adding a little fussiness.


Norm
 
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so you want to drive a high powered golf cart?
 

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What are you guys going to do when they get rid of sticks? More and more auto makers are saying goodbye to stick!
 

Norm Peterson

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A bit hard to pin down just how the ratios ought to be.
For sure, and that's perhaps the understatement of this whole thread.

I don't think that a great job of choosing those ratios can be done without paying some attention to axle gearing and drive tire size. Basically, you wouldn't choose the same ratios or even the number of underdrives and overdrives for a 3.15 axle that you would if you were working with 4.09s. That's perhaps an exaggerated example, but by the same token the best ratios for 3.73s wouldn't be optimal for 3.31s. Maybe not even for 3.55s, depending on the kind of driving involved.


In a Mustang V-8 I might like three underdrive gears, a direct drive 4th and overdrive 5th and 6th.
In a car with a less powerful engine perhaps four underdrive gears, direct drive 5th and an overdrive 6th for cruising.
Personally, I think that gear ratio spacing matters more than the number of underdrives and overdrives. Best transmission efficiency occurs in the direct drive gear, so you might want to set the axle gear and tire size to comfortably use that gear for the speed where you do most of your sustained driving.

The 2-3-4 sequence in the MT82D4 is too wide for road course performance (this being a 3 underdrive/2 overdrive transmission).

The 5-6 sequence in the original MT82 is too wide if you can reasonably reach redline in 5th with significant track distance remaining before the upcoming braking zone. And the underdrives are too short for use with 3.73s if serious autocross is your game.


Norm
 

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we'll either hang on tenaciously to the ones we have, all end up buying Mazdas, or get lobotomies so we can walk around like the rest of the drooling zombies. But hasn't The Walking Dead taught us anything? We can (and it is righteous) to Resist.
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