My mum had a couple of Renault 6s which had a conventional 4-speed layout
1 3
2 4 R
but using the same "hockey-stick" gear lever that came of the dashboard: it pulled in and out to go between 1 and 2, and rotated by about 45 degrees to go between 2 and 3 or 3 and R. It's the first car I drove that actually had a spring to bias it into the 3/4 plane - my mum's previous Morris Minor had a lever that was equally at home in 1/2 or 3/4, so you had to be very careful not to hit the wrong gear.
It was a very easy action (even if it looked bizarre) because there was no confusion whatsoever between the 1/2 plane and the 3/4 - I never hit 1st instead of 3rd etc.
However the linkage under the bonnet/hood was very primitive. The R6 (and probably the R4 and the Citroen 2CV) had the gearbox in front of the engine (ie closer to the radiator) with a rod sticking up which moved in the same way as a conventional floor-mounted gear lever would move. There was a long rod from the gear lever which went over the top of the engine. A flat plate, welded to the rod, and with a large hole in it, meshed with the gearbox rod, with a large rubber grommet between the two.
As you pulled the gear lever in and out (1 to 2) it moved the gearbox lever fore and aft; as you rotated the gear lever (2 to 3) it moved the gearbox lever side to side.
Except... that rubber grommet could come loose. While I was learning to drive, my dad told me to turn round by reversing into a farm gateway. So I went into reverse, turned and stopped, and went to put it into first. As I took it out of reverse, the lever went floppy, came out of my hand and the knob on the end turned upside down and bashed me on the knee. My dad maintains that I came out with the inane question "Daaaaad. Is it *supposed* to do that?". We looked under the bonnet and the grommet was lying on the ground under the car, and the plate and gearbox lever had come unmeshed. It was a simple task to put the car into first by operating the gearbox lever directly, drive out of the gateway, retrieve the grommet from under where the car had been, refit it and drive home. But we took the car to local Renault garage to get it looked at. They said it was a known problem.
The series 2 Morgan 4/4 had an interesting arrangement. Ford 3 speed plus reverse box, mounted so far forward that they put a yoke on the stick and a sliding *push me pull you* operator hung below the dashboard.
This had the interesting effect of reversing the gear positions laterally.
I would have thought that was the 'standard' for a 3 speed in the floor. Also on the colume.
I was at a local teen hangout in my teens and a VW with 3 girls had pulled in and was facing a wall. They did not know how to get it into reverse so they could pull out. I had to do that for them. Forgot where the reverse was, but I do remember having to push the gear shift down. I think it was push it down and then over to the driver side and up.
My 1965 Plymouth Satallite 4 speed had the Reverse way over to the right with a stiff spring and it was either up or back.
I bought a 1972 Dodge Deamon with a 4 speed. Worst car I ever had. Got rid of it with less than 20,000 miles on it. I bought it new and had driven it several days with no problem. Pulled in to fill it up with gas and went to start it. Would not start. The service station man told me to push in the clutch. Then it started. I guess that I must have been doing that all along. I usually put the 4 speeds in neutral and start the cars. Then they added the clutch safety switch.
I had a '49 Chrysler New Yorker with one of those and a cast iron straight eight engine. No PS and I learned about my wife's extended vocabulary when she had to parallel park the beast when acting as designated driver. 0 to 60 sometime that day but once it got rolling...
Oh, that brings back a memory. It was 1964 and I was taking my now wife to her senior prom. My car was a Corvair Monza, not a very good car for a double date on prom night.
My brother-in-law though, recently bought a '49 Chrysler from the older lady that lived behind us. I borrowed it for the prom. It was a high car that you could almost stand up in, great for girls in prom dresses.
Every girl at the dance was jealous when they saw us arrive in that beast. It has some sort of odd transmission too. I think it was a semi auto that you had to depress the clutch to put it into gear.
Wow, I must be special :-) I always look precisely where I was.
I don't have a problem with that either. The mirror is in my peripheral vision, so I can glance straight to it as I can see where it is. In fact half the time I don't even look at it. If I just need to know if there's a car in the mirror or not, I can see that from peripheral vision.
At the ridiculously slow speed elderly drivers go at, they can take 5 minutes to react :-)
Really? I thought the distance must be standard, because I've always found the pedal right where I expect it, even after buying a new car or borrowing one I've never driven before.
Never noticed that.
Again I thought they were all the same, I've never found the brake higher or lower than I thought.
Not possible since it's MUCH lower.
Oh my, that's time to stop driving.
Select N. Or in some without gearbox protection, P.
I also detect very quickly I'm in the wrong gear. For example I'm in 3rd instead of 1st (I thought I'd changed down when I stopped but I hadn't - I have a shit memory). My left foot subconsciously releases the clutch more slowly, allowing it to not stall as I take off. Yet I've seen a couple of friends stall the car in the middle of the junction, and my aunt cause a bus to rear-end her car, smashing the back window and injuring her dog.
I've never known a diesel do that (except my Fiat but that was overheating at the time), and I'm surprised of all the makes it would be VW to f*ck it up that badly.
The only Golf I've had was an auto diesel (TDI). That was an amazing car for overtaking, especially if you wanted to scare the passenger by doing it without warning. It would drop two gears at once in an instant.
Nope, don't need to. I'm sitting with my foot on the brake and the clutch pressed fully in. I wish to move off uphill. I release the clutch as much as possible without the engine stalling. Then I let go of the brake. There's enough power at idle (in a petrol or diesel) to prevent it rolling back. Now press the accelerator and release the clutch further. If it's an absurdly steep hill, as in one that's too steep for the average person to be able to jog up, it might start to roll back, but you can catch it before you've moved more than a few inches.
I seldom use neutral at all, unless I'm waiting at the lights or in a traffic jam so long that my left foot gets fed up of holding the clutch down.
I had to start in gear when I snapped the clutch cable in my first car. Ok, the snapped cable was probably a result of me doing way too many wheelspins.
That's the problem, getting used to a car that looks after you. After having three autos in a row, I started my next manual in gear quite a few times. Slightly embarrassing when it was in my drive and my neighbour was mowing the lawn, and I slammed into some stuff on my driveway in front of the car.
I once parked in gear on a very steep hill, the handbrake was non functional so I didn't bother applying it. I got out of the car and it stayed put, but as I walked to the house owner's door, luckily her gardener shouted, "Your car is doing a dance!" It was jumping one engine revolution (or a quarter - one cylinder?) at a time and rolling down the hill slowly in jerks. I ran back and turned the wheel so it rested the tyre against the kerb.
I hate waggling, in my current car it's actually quite difficult to find neutral. It's a short shift gearbox and almost everywhere is a gear. But it does mean I can flick between gears extremely quickly when overtaking, and without much force from my hand, I can actually do it with one finger.
I like creep, it's very useful when in a queue in a traffic jam. Instead of having to let go of the brake and press the accelerator, I only have to release thre brake for up to walking speed.
I had a Peugeot with a stretched accelerator cable. I couldn't get more than one third throttle. It got so bad I couldn't go more than 20mph up a steep hill. I got lots of angry lorry drivers overtaking and hooting. I would shout out the window at them, "It's a French piece of shit! Not my fault it won't go any faster!"
I left skid marks in people's underwear when I did it with 4 pedestrians walking in front of me. They were in no hurry to get out of my way, so I did a very short wheelspin then stopped rather close to them. They ran. Very quickly.
That's the one. It was early in the development of automatic transmissions and had both a clutch and a fluid coupling.
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Mine had the tartan plaid upholstery.
My to-be father-in-law had a thing about Checkers. She went to a different high school but her brother was in my high school and offered to finance the senior prom if I took his sister. I was 16 and couldn't drive at night so it had the added advantage of coming with a ride. Maybe not my finest moment but so it goes.
Several years later the old man was still into Checkers and we borrowed the silver one for a Christmas jaunt to Mexico. Sammy couldn't drive for shit but kept whining 'It's my father's car. Let me drive.' We finally gave in and he made it about 100 miles before rolling it outside of Mayfield KY. They towed the wreck to a garage in town where it was a wonderment to the townspeople. "Is that thar one of them Mercedes Benz things?"
Other than NY city cabs, Checkers were mostly used for movies set in central Europe where they wanted a car nobody would recognize.
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The first photo nails it. They were interesting to work on. The engine was a Chevy of some sort in that era but the rest came from the parts bin. They definitely were roomy. Making out in the back seat was a whole different experience than the back seat of my '51 Chevy coupe.
"Commander Kinsey" wrote in message news:op.0ges41mvwdg98l@glass...
I can see from peripheral vision that a car is present (peripheral vision is remarkably good at noticing small changes - evolved from detecting predators), but I then need to look directly at it (via the mirror) in central vision to work out where it is in relation to my car.
There are differences. Smaller cars have a narrower footwell so the pedals may be closer together.
In a smaller car, the wheelarch may intrude quite a long way into the pedal space, so they all need to be moved left (right in an LHD car). Ford Fiesta and Vauxhall Nova had this.
Now that definitely varies. Some cars the accelerator and brake pedals are almost at the same level from the floor, whereas one car I drove, the brake was a lot further from the floor. I had to move the seat quite a long way back to be able to reach both pedals without moving my heel fore/aft as I pivoted on it from accelerator to brake.
That reminds me of a woman I used to work with who was a fairly average height (probably about 5'6") and drove a fairly average car (VW Golf) with the seat in what looked a fairly normal position, but she said she used to lift her foot right off the floor as she let the clutch out, rather than rocking on her heel, until a colleague suggested she might find it easier to rock.
Agreed!
I was thinking of a less drastic way of slowing the car a moderate amount, rather than a full on emergency. In a manual car if the accelerator stuck slightly and then moved slightly more that expected, you'd dip the clutch just a fraction and not even need to touch the brake.
Yes this was (I think) the Mark 4 or 5 that had the notorious "auto-stall" Pumpe Duse engine. It was a lovely car in all other respects, but I was left wondering "would I ever get used to this?". I've only driven diesels (apart from the occasional loan car from a garage) for the last 20-odd years, and when I was looking to change my car some years ago, some garages only had the car I was interested in as a petrol when I went in for a test drive (without pre-warning them - my fault!). So I tried that car to test everything except engine, with a view to going back for a second drive with a diesel. And I never stalled in any of those - maybe because I was making extra allowance for slightly higher engine revs as I set off. But that Golf bit me several times - maybe I should have tried to persuade myself that it needed to be driven like a petrol - and a hesitant one at that. Once I'd got the car moving, it pulled fantastically well, until I was crawling forward in a queue of traffic or setting off from rest.
Bloody hell. I've never had that happen. Normally first or reverse is such a low gear that the engine compression will easily hold the car. Good thing you were able to get back in the car and stop it.
I once had the accelerator cable jam totally on my mum's car - also a "French piece of shit": a Renault 6. It happened when I was learning to drive. I'd gone out for a drive with my dad and I came to a fairly steep uphill with a hairpin bend at the top, so I changed into second. Once I'd gone round the bend and the road started to level out, I changed up into third and I noticed the engine revving a bit. I didn't think much of it, except that I'd slightly cocked up the coordination of clutch and accelerator. But when the road became level and I changed into fourth, the engine revved even more and shot forward with an acceleration not normally associated with a 1.1 litre Renault 6. And it carried on surging forward even after I took my foot off the throttle. My first instinct was to turn the engine off, but I was wary of engaging the steering lock. I've since learned that steering locks don't work like that and the steering remains free, even in the fully off position, as long as the key is in the lock. I'm not sure I'd want to try it in case I found a car that was the exception to that rule. So I jammed on the footbrake and very gingerly turned the key to the accessory position. Getting the car home was "interesting". Dad managed to stuff the frayed cable back into the sheath enough for the throttle valve on the carb to close, and he drive it home (slowly) using the slow-running control on the choke to control his speed, without touching the accelerator pedal. All went well until he stopped in the middle of the road, about to turn right into our drive. And he instinctively pressed the throttle to set off - and the car very nearly shot through the garage door!
The one thing I knew I absolutely *mustn't* do was press the clutch, otherwise the engine would have no mechanical load and would over-rev - no rev-limiter on a car of that age. I since calculated that at (say) 7000 rpm, the force on the pistons as they change direction is roughly equivalent to the weight of the car.
The only time I've been constrained to going up hills very slowly was after my car had been into the garage to have a fault fixed. We'd gone out for a meal that evening, as I was driving through Richmond (the North Yorkshire one) the car suddenly seemed to lose power. It was fine on the level but when I came to a hill, which Richmond has a lot of in the town centre, it wouldn't pull very well. Going back home afterwards there's a long gradual hill up to the moor - an incline that my car will normally do at 50-60 as long as I remember to change down to 5th. This time it was struggling at 20 mph. I was in danger of getting overtaken by milk floats or the tanks from Catterick Camp. I booked the car into the garage, not relishing the journey over there. Then something made me check under the bonnet. Bingo. The air intake hose had pulled off the turbo - not sure whether it was between the air filter and the turbo or the turbo and the engine. It took a few seconds to refit the hose and tighten the jubilee clip *properly*, and normal service was resumed. Now I know what my car drives like with no turbo - quite a shock how *much* of a difference it makes. The garage confirmed that the work they'd done had required that hose to be removed, so they hadn't tightened it properly afterwards. I had a very grovelling letter and an offer of my next service for free!
Not an auto, though. Definition of that is one that changes gears itself.
The fluid flywheel replaced the clutch on a manual for starting off. The 'clutch' pedal operated the brake bands in the epicyclic box. But not intended to be used as a clutch in the normal meaning of it. If you did, the bands would soon wear out.
It's true early autos were a development of this design of box, though.
Rover designed and made a real oddball fitted to some P4 versions. A two speed plus reverse manual box, with a torque converter and overdrive which operated on both forward gears. So was a form of auto with a high and low drive range.
How odd that every car I've had has the pedals in identical positions. Maybe the UK has stricter requirements?
Even if you press the wrong pedal, it's easy to simply let go of it again. There's no excuse fo doing something wrong for more than a fraction of a second.
Not sure why that's a problem. I don't consciously remember what gear I'll need for a particular hill. I drop a gear when I don't have enough power from the engine.
My Renault goes down to turn the wiper on. I can't remember, but I thought the standard was up for on. I often find myself trying to turn it on by pushing it up and sometimes almost snap it off in temper.
The stupidest thing I found was borrowing my neighbour's Rover 75. Every single car in the entire history of mankind has the headlight switch as a swivel thing on the end of the left (indicator) stalk. Not the Rover. It's a switch somewhere on the bloody dashboard! And what's more, the interior light goes off as soon as you start the car, so you can't find the f****ng headlight switch! I had to turn the engine off, open the door to cause the light to come back on, then hunt around for the f****ng headlights. Then when I get back home with it, the headlights won't go off. I turned them off, got out of the car, locked it, still on. They turned off on some weird timer. I wonder how many people forget to turn them off and run the battery flat thinking it's just the timer still running?
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