I borrowed my sister and her car today to teach my son how to drive a manual transmission car. He's thinking of buying one and had never learned to drive them. My sister insisted on coming along because she had taught her own 3 sons over the years to drive manual transmission and thought it would be fun to watch me enlightened as to how that goes. Her 3 were incredibly resistant to mastering the technique. As she said, if there was a car or a pole in the parking lot, the first one would hit it, the second one always found some way to drive out of the lot and onto the grass and the 3rd was always a surprise.
It went the way I thought it would. He's been driving for 7 years. Show the gears, go through them all with the clutch in, "OK, drive." The hill was iffy for a few minutes but I heard words I never expected to hear in this lifetime after a year as auxiliaries officer on the Middle East Force Flagship. "I was worried about over-revving the engine and that's why I kept stalling." Hah!
I remember well the day in Diego Garcia when we all got into the Captain's gig to head back to the ship riding at anchor in the lagoon and listening as the idiot coxswain wound the engine up to 5000 rpm in neutral and then slammed it into reverse gear so we'd have a dramatic moment getting underway from fleet landing.
It was memorable. The boat slowly drifted over to the beach and grounded and the XO and I exchanged looks with the Chief Engineer and I shrugged my shoulders as the First Lieutenant was explaining it was all my fault and the fault of the engine men who maintained the engines. The V drive coupler had been torn apart and the drive shaft severely damaged. It was a sort of everyday occurrence on that ship back then under that First Lieutenant and Bosun. Nothing would get the bosun's mates to stop destroying any machinery they touched.
The new First Lieutenant joined us in the Seychelles just before we headed up to conduct MCM operations in the Red Sea. All the idiot shenanigans stopped the next day. The destructive mindset was one that was expected out of the old Bosun and the previous First Lieutenant and was gone within 24 hours.
Still, it caused a smile to appear on my face to hear my son express his concern about over-revving the engine before putting it into gear. Whole worlds can be conquered simply by understanding that not everything has to be wound up to destruction.
OK, admittedly, Cortez took another approach, but still...
9 comments:
yeh, but did it learn how to do the manual transmission thingy ?
Looking back, I think my dad taught me manual transmissions in the best way: dirt bikes and driving a small tractor to mow and bush-hog the yard. Lots of repetions to build experience starting early. By the time I got a learner's permit, doing it with a car was easy (my first two cars were manual transmissions). I was sort of tempted with my last vehicle purchase to get a Toyoata Tacoma, they still offer one with manual transmission and it's fun to drive
Oh yes.
I was fortunate as a young lad to grow up on a ranch. I learned to drive our surplus WWII jeep by age 8. I was even more fortunate in my early teens to teach others my own age.
1) Eeeease the clutch out.
2) Yeah, don't over rev the engine.
3) When the washboard road surface induces conciliations, take your foot off
the accelerator.
We also had a surplus trailer to go with the jeep. This experience served me well in uniform. I was one of maybe three bodies in my unit who could back the combo in a straight line.
Good work teaching a manual transmission.
I remember on the ranch learning how to repair them also. Teaches you the reason to play smart with the clutch and not overrev.
I always made it a point to teach my kids on standard shift first. If you can drive that, automatic is easy. Never understood teaching kids to drive an automatic first.
I'm a country kid, so I learned before age 10, driving the truck pulling the hay wagon, an old 3-on-the-tree.
--Tennessee Budd
I grew up on a farm. We practiced driving in the hay pasture after it had been cut and bailed. We were in mom's station wagon that had 3 on the tree.
I'm surprised the coxswain wasn't in front of a Captain's Mast for destroying Navy Equipment later that day along the Bosun and First Looie... All three were idiots of the first water.
This was LaSalle, the Middle East Force flagship. I was, in addition to being Auxiliaries also the Legal Officer. The CO and both of his XOs and both CHENG followed a tradition that I really respected, back then and all the way through my 26 years in the Navy. They did not prefer charges for machinery that broke, for any reason. In my 369 days onboard we got rid of precisely one man because he broke stuff and he didn't go to Mast, we simply sent him home a little early. Either the 1st LT or the Bosun wrote me up for "forcing a safeguard" a couple of times. It was really amusing, both times.
I think I will write up my very first day on that strange ship to sort of introduce readers to the old Navy that passed away many decades ago. Fortunately, I have the record of that event in the first journal.
As I look back on that year I recall now that almost nobody ever got written up for things that were not cut and dried violations outside the scope of the Commanding Officer's control. There were perhaps 3 or 4 good order and discipline cases and that was it. The rest were simple drug cases from the time before it was a sentence of death for a sailor's career.
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