I learned to drive a split transmission on a 10-ton boom truck. As has been said, it’s just a matter of a lot of practice and developing the coordination for double clutching. You normally don’t need all the low range gears unless you’re hauling a heavy load, and slip shifting, if you can master it, takes the onus of the clutch work off.
I can drive it!
My instructor said he’s going to eventually teach me to float gears, but that i have to learn double clutching for the licensing test. That makes sense - they want to know that you understand how the official intended method of shifting works. But yes, I’ve gathered that most experienced drivers don’t use the clutch most of the time.
I was originally just planning to get the Class B license, so no over the road driving with a trailer. But I’ve been told by several people including my teacher, that I should just go all the way and get the class A. I don’t know whether I want to or not. It would entail having to learn all the skills of maneuvering the trailer, on top of everything else that I’m just now trying to wrap my head around. I think there’s enough work available for dump trucks, flatbed trucks, and waste container trucks, and various local delivery jobs with box trucks, that I would be OK with just the Class B. I’m not needing a full-time job here, I already have other gigs that I’d need to juggle the driving with. On the other hand, maybe I’d actually enjoy OTR if I tried it.
Get the Class A. You can practically write your own ticket to any job! That’s like a golden resume hanging around your neck.
I just had a short conversation with Mr VOW on this topic. Back in the days when he was Less-than-Sgt VOW, one of the many jobs he did was driving a truck. He had no formal training, LOL, it was more like someone pointed to a truck and said “Here ya go!” (No way they could do that today!)
He drove a deuce and a half pulling a trailer, and later he drove a semi with a trailer. He echoed what everyone here has said: practice, practice, practice!
On his own time, he took the truck to an empty parking lot, and he taught himself how to back up with a trailer. Staight or with a turn, he did it over and over using the lines in the parking lot as his guides.
Years later, when he was Sgt VOW, he didn’t routinely drive trucks. There came a time when he participated in a field exercise (sleeping on rocks and eating dirt) and his company was assigned to a difficult-to-access area. One individual got stuck with the unhappy job of parking a semi trailer in a specific area.
Side note: field exercises were often carried out on private property, and the German owner expected to be heavily compensated for any destruction. Trees were damned expensive, the US Government had to pay for the board feet the tree would have produced at maturity!
Anyway, this guy had to park the trailer between the trees, and after several false starts he was so flustered, he jumped out of the tractor and probably said every single word the OP’s pastor/instructor doesn’t want to hear.
Sgt VOW stepped up and said, “Get out of the way. I’ll do it.”
He parked that trailer like it had eyes in the back of it. No trees were damaged.
The company had a lot of visitors to their site, to see the miraculously-parked trailer!
Practice, practice, practice!
~VOW
Well alright, looks like I’ll go all the way for the Class A license. I guess it worked out better in the end because the original company that was supposedly going to train me would have only taught me how to operate a dump truck; now I’ll be able to learn a broader amount of knowledge. I suppose it’s better to be able to use a trailer than not.
I’m still not really interested in long-haul driving, but at least this would open the door to local delivery jobs with trailers.
If you’re driving a dump truck, 95% of the time you’ll be exempt from keeping logs anyway. Stay within 100 miles and all you have to do is a time sheet.
If my sister (né brother) could do it, so can you!
Yeah, basically clutch to start moving from a stop… And thats it. Hell, once I got used to it, I started floating even in my personal cars.
As others have said, pre-trip inspection is huge on the practical test.
Fun part of my training… Dirt road, rural Texas. Trailer hooked up. Instructor has me drive a ways, then stop. Then says… Back up. As fast as you can. Keep going until you are told to stop.
It was terrifying, but in that five minutes I learned more about controlling that trailer than I could have in days of work at a normal pace.
I have been busting ass on those pre-trips, don’t worry. I mean busting ass. I mean cracking, bending, and breaking ass. I was watching the videos every day for WEEKS before my training even started, and had practiced familiarizing myself with the components on several different trucks. My instructor has me do a full pre-trip on that truck every time I drive it, which will continue for the next 2 weeks. That includes testing the air compressor governor, testing the parking brake and the service brake for leaks by timing them for pressure loss over 60 seconds, fanning down the brakes to verify that the low air alarm comes on, continuing to do so until 20 psi to test the spring brake, and then (after running the compressor back up, of course) testing the parking brake while rolling forward, and then finally testing the service brake while rolling forward for pull to the side(s).
That checklist was all from memory.
I don’t know the first thing about semis, but now I’m curious – is this 10 speed manual a “twin stick” arrangement, with one stick that selects high range/low range, and a second that’s just like a normal 5-speed manual, making a total of 10 possible gear ratios? Or is it literally one stick for all 10 gears? If it’s the latter I can imagine those gears would be hard to find. I can’t see how one could find them with any more than 6.
Some transmissions are kind of like that, but I think they’re not really used much anymore. That’s called an “auxiliary gearbox” with two sticks. The ones now have a high and a low range selected by flipping a little switch on the gear lever itself. When the switch is down, the pattern is, from upper left to upper right, R(low), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. When the switch is up, it becomes R (high), 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.
edit - that’s for a 10-speed transmission, some truck transmissions have as many as 18 gears.
Good point. I was driving thirty years ago, when paper-and-pencil ruled, but I have no doubt that logging technology has come a long way since then. Heck it would have been nice to have a “one-stop shop” like an Ipad for such things as the AC and radio.
Actually reading your post a little closer, what you’re describing is basically how the transmission is, except instead of a stick to select between the two ranges, it’s a switch. I think some trucks do use an actual second stick to select between the ranges instead of a switch though.
An auxiliary gearbox, which I’ve never used and probably never will, but have seen videos of, has two sticks each with their own shift pattern. I think most of them have a 5-gear pattern and then the other stick has 4 sub-gears for each gear of the main pattern. So each time you shift to a gear of the main gearbox, you can also choose between four sub-speeds for each of those gears with the other stick. But I don’t think you NEED to shift through every single possible gear - I think it’s more so that you can have a finer degree of control over the amount of torque to the wheels, depending on what load you’re carrying. Just google “Spicer transmission.”
For the split tranny that I drove, there was one stick. Mounted on the stick, next to the shifter knob, was a push-pull knob that you activated with your index and middle fingers. This provided air-assist to shift the tranny between high and low range. So: run through the gears from 1-5, pull the knob up with your fingers while at the same time double-clutching, and then run through 6-10 in the same shifting pattern. There aren’t ten shift locations to learn, just five. You also have two reverse gears.
5 on 4 quad-box, love them!
Many moons ago I drove raggedy old Autocar concrete mixers with that setup behind worn out, wheezy Cummins 250s.
The boys in the truck shop said they knew it was me coming through the yard because I made it sound like an automatic.
Left arm hooked through the steering wheel to shift the auxiliary box, right hand shifting the main.
Fun! 
I think the average person would be shocked at how little horsepower big trucks actually have.
Is that sort of like the front and back shifter on a bicycle?
And I’ll just add that if you want real job security, if you can get a CDL and pass a background check, I’ve never seen any school district that wasn’t hiring school bus drivers.
Is a CDL commonly needed to be a school bus driver? It’s not required anywhere I’ve lived.
ETA: Have to retract that. Apparently it is required here now and there is a special test for buses. I don’t think it’s necessary to pass the same test for a Class A vehicle, but except for some specific bus test it should be a subset of the skills needed for that.
So yes, a CDL would be valuable in that way.
sort of, but not quite the same. here’s a video of shifting a 13-speed Eaton:
I’ve read that the average age of the American truck driver is 55. I’ve also read many of the younger ones are clueless drivers with poor training who only know how to drive the automatic trucks that are becoming more common. (Well, take that with a grain of salt, because I’ve read it on the comments on YouTube videos, which may not be reflective of reality.) In any case, at 33 I guess I will be a younger than average driver, but I certainly am NOT getting poor training - I am receiving private lessons from an experienced driver, rather than going through one of the “CDL mills” as some of the larger training fleets are referred to.
I’ll also be able to tell people “I learned how to drive during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020” years from now, with a thousand-yard stare in my eyes - that’s gotta count for something.