I did become quite good double clutching at 13 yrs old when I started driving grain truck to the elevetor in downtown Kalispell, MT. It's funny now (maybe scary) looking back, as we kids were giving the oldest/loosest rigs. I was usually in a '58 GMC 2T 4sp/2sp which felt like the front end was on ice with a load on. A very narrow two lane high bridge over the Flathead river always had us praying for no oncoming Semi's to skin by. Those first handful of runs I did had the experience of butt off the seat standing one footed on the brake and clutching down gears approaching the stop light and traffic at a stop. One of my kids will be 13 next summer. It's probably illegal now. Jerry, what I'm not expeienced at is not using the clutch with "RPM matching". I've attempted it breifly with no success and stopped because I was in someone elses rig and didn't want to risk damaging anything. Any tip on that?
"Brownie" is a slang term used by some of us old farts to describe all auxiliary transmissions, but the original term referred to the Brown-Lipe transmissions that were sold as optional equipment on big rigs. Spicer, Borg-Warner, Saginaw, and other manufacturers also made auxiliary transmissions. In addition to your 4X3 setup, there were 5X4's, 5X3's, 4X4's, and various other combinations. Some had overdrive top gears, while others had direct drive as the top-end ratio. There were several sizes of gearboxes available, depending on the torque output of the engines they were paired with. Unless it's been lost or damaged, there is usually a tag somewhere on the side of the transmission giving a model number, and sometimes the gear ratios are also listed. I've got an older Motor heavy truck manual that has a pretty good manual transmission section with exploded views and teardown/reassembly instructions for some of the more common variations. Virtually all auxiliaries I've had experience with are non-synchronized, so you'll need to get very good at double-clutching and/or RPM matching.
One old Ford grain truck from the early 1950's that I worked on had a 5X4 main/auxiliary transmission setup, plus a manually-shifted 2-speed rear axle. It had a "tag" axle behind the drive axle, and about a 20-foot grain bed on it. The old flathead Lincoln V-8 needed all the help it could get moving that rig around! I'll bet the driver had his hands full with three shifters!
Jerry
