This weekend a friend and I both noticed a new (to us) Ford Pick-up commercial and they were demontrating how powerful this Ford doolie is.
Our discussions sex, flowers, canyons etc died when we couldn’t agree on why the truck was pulling these 3000 lb blocks with the cable hooked to the Front of the vehicle.
We agreed that it most probably had to do with traction.
Then we couldn’t agree that the truck would have more traction in Front versus Reverse (or vise versa)
I told him that the teeming millions would certainly know…So why?
A rear wheel drive truck will have the most traction when pulling in the normal direction. Torque of the driving axle shifts traction force toward the back wheels while it unloads the front wheels. Think of it as wheelstanding like a dragster but without the front wheels actually coming off the ground.
Hoever, with a four wheel drive truck the most traction might be when pulling backwards because the front axle already has the weight of the engine and a good portion of the drivetrain. Add the torque of the axle and even more force is exerted on the front wheels for traction.
That’s my WAG and I’m sticking to it.
I have not seen the commercial, but my first thought was that reverse is a lower gear that first.
I hadn’t considered that but do manual truck transmissions have a creeper first gear anymore?
Rick nailed it. In most vehicles, reverse is the lowest gear. That doesn’t really matter for the 4WD trucks with a low-range 4WD, because that 1st gear is really low!
Every time I’ve needed to haul or pull something (including pulling stumps out of the ground and pulling my 11,000-pound tractor out of a mudhole), I’ve been able to do it moving forward. With my old truck, I was concerned about pulling the front bumper off. My newer Ford has hooks connected to the frame in front for pulling backward.
By the way, HugoRed, they’re called “duallies,” named for the dual rear wheels.
It’s just a commercial writer’s artistic freedom to show the strength of the truck, not that pulling one way is better than another. If we believe everything we see in car commercials then every Cadillac CTS owner can go sliding sideways through wet parking lots without fear of crashing into other vehicles.
I don’t think so for ordinary consumer trucks. Only trucks I’ve driven that did were 5 spd Hi-Lo, and 13 spd Roadranger.
Please see the following site:
http://www.chuckschevytruckpages.com/models.html
I didn’t mean a dual range transmission, but an extra low, unsynchronized first gear. It’s been a long time since I drove a manual transmission, American made pickup so I wasn’t sure. I worked for a Ford dealer in the mid eighties they still had the low + three road gear four speeds like they’ve used for years but they five speed trannys with no low were becoming popular.
Of course it’s all BS unless the commercial demonstrates a truck doing a task that a competing truck can’t. Were the blocks on wheels or sliding on the ground?
Why? To see that some guy named Chuck refers to a truck nicknamed the “Big Dooley” (which isn’t even how you spelled it)? If you’re referring in general to trucks with dual rear wheels, the term is “dually.” This being GQ, you’ll probably require more of a cite than searching Google for “dually truck” and getting 157,000 results, where “doolie truck” (as you wrote in the OP) gets less than 4,000.
Okay, then. Here’s a cite from ford.com, and a cite from dodge.com. Look through truck literature and talk to dealers, and you’ll get plenty of further confirmation.
And you might also want to check Wikipedia.