i have to teach my wife how to use a manual transmition
 

do you all have any advice? i did this once before with my sister 15 years ago in my 63 bug. now the car i have as a instructional tool is my 66 912. i just don't want to be stuck and not have her be able to drive.

Best advice I can think of would be to have someone else do it.

Unless of course your wife is not defensive and argumentative like the rest of the female population.

Find another woman to teach her. Is your sister available?

see if you can find something a bit newer and easier to drive to teach her on.

take her to a secluded location (no, really this isn't leading anyplace ;) ) so she can't get flustered by other cars around.

Teach her to just start the car rolling, feel the clutch engagement. Have her get the car rolling 50, 75 or ever 100 times until she can do it easily. That's the hardest part. Once the car is rolling, the shifting is easy to do.

If you are right handed and play golf , go out and try to hit a bucket of balls left handed. Focus on how frustrating it is for you to try and do something that usually comes natural to you.
Remember that when teaching your wife.
Good luck
Steve

+1. i tried to teach my wife to cast a baitcasting rod/reel..relationship almost ended right there, right then.

The day before - outside of the car - try and explain a little bit what and why cars have gears and a clutch..

- Reference a bicycle with gears. Going up hills, going fast, carrying a load..

- Reference how a clutch "connects and disconnects" the engine from the transmission.

- Remind her a car at idle turns about 500 RPM.



I won't help a bit. But you keep the high ground when she gets defensive and yells at you!

Have some one else do it.

If you have to, click over the parts catalog and order a clutch kit from Pelican first. It will get there just in time for installation. :)

See if you can find a truck or something with a some torque, it's much easier to learn when you can just practice easing out the clutch w/o having to worry with the gas.

Seriously, Lane912... a lot of it depends on your demeanor and your wife's personality and if she has a fragile self-esteem. If you can maintain a calm, factual demeanor and she is not overly sensitive and/or in possession of a bad case of "fear of failure," you could do it.

I taught my first wife how to drive a manual. We went way outside of town on a deserted, two lane blacktop farm road and started from a dead stop about 10 times, each time slowing back to a stop until she got that part down, then did stop > takeoff > second gear > stop several times and went from there.

There was no yelling, etc. That is what makes it a major nightmare for most women.

I taught her to use the handbrake (Opel Manta) for pulling away from a stop on hills until she felt confident with trying the conventional way. She ended up preferring a manual over an auto.

If you're concerned about how it would affect you to have your 912 jumping and lurching, maybe find a newer car belonging to a friend that has an easier clutch feel for her to learn on, then move to your car.

Order your new clutch and pressure plate now.

One foot in other foot out....except for brakes, both feet in.

Good luck.

Yes sage advise !

Rent a manual and have someone else teach her.

Well i heard it was easy to learn in a porsche . a 911 atleast. because you can let the clutch out slowly without ever touching the gas and it wont conk out. Then you can work up from there.

A VW bug would be even better, and the replacement drivetrain parts are 1/10th the cost.

+1000!!!
Rent a car for $50 and save yourself from worrying about her burning up your clutch and crunching your gears.

Rent a wrangler. You sit up high and the first gear is so low that it won't stall even when you practically dump the clutch at idle. You try and teach her on a street car and she will need to rev it up too much. I don't know how the 3.7 V6 wranglers are but I am sure they are just fine. I am not sure that you can still rent a 4.0 I-6 wrangler anymore.

Sounds like a recipe for divorce. When I bought my old gf a ski lesson (I wasn't dumb enough to try to teach her myself), the instructor says he's seen numerous marriages end on the hill. :D

any 4 wheel drive with low range for that matter. Im no renter but do they even rent manuals these days?

Turn the idle speed up a little bit and make the first on a slight down hill slope. Extra nice to find an empty sloping parking lot.

Safety first. All actions are right foot brake or gas and left clutch. Always depress brake pedal AND clutch to start. On our old cars, there is no neutral safety switch.

The hardest thing to teach people is the friction zone. Too many people are raised that everything is an on/off switch like a video controller. You must FEEL the friction point or you're doomed to failure. Practice that first. Friction, pedal in, pedal out, etc. With the idle speed turned up she can feel the grab easier and will stall it less often.

It is takeoff in first and reverse that give people the most challenges. Get that ironed out smooth as can be in the parking lot. Then move on to quiet roads. Pick roads where the stop signs have the car facing nose down hill. Nose uphill is a tough one for a beginner and murder on your clutch. 2nd thru 5th will cause you less drama than start/first/reverse and they start to be fun for the driver. The key here is finding what's fun, not what is an absolute chore.

Don't aim to make her good at this. Aim to make her safe and reasonably competant. Good comes with time and practice. If you're down here in southern Oregon, I'd be glad to take her out for a lesson or practice. But be warned, I'll either take her off-roading (in my pathfinder) or to the autocross track - LOL!

angela

ok thanks for the sugestions i am going to have her read all of them when she gets home. she reads this forum from time to time.

Can we say rental car?

NO way I will teach me wife to drive a stick. Then I'll be putting in claims for body work on the PORSCHE and LOTUSes.

BTW - anyone want to teach Serge how to drive a manual? He destroyed the clutch in my 911 a while back.

1st, go to a friendly doctor. Explain that you will be teaching your wife to drive a manual transmission. Politely ask for the stongest tranquilizer they can legally provide, which will still leave you coherent.

Once a stock of said pills is available, take one. Then follow all advice from above.

lolo, why is everybody telling you have to drive a stick? What you have an auto ;) ?

1.) rent-a-car ... you can then have fun with it yourself before you bring it back.
2.) sit in the back seat ... that way she won't notice as much when you go to slam on the brakes!
3.) IF it's your personal car, mention that you might/will buy parts
4.) NO cars or traffic in the vicinity. panic is bad enough when the car starts hopping all over the place
5.) car fresheners to remove the stench of burnt transmission
6.) tell her you love her 10 x + before you start
7.) have some hard alcohol ready when you get home ... teaching works better when you're drunk though ;) but DWI is not cool
8.) Have her practice on your feet where 1 foot is the gas and the other is the clutch ... sounds dumb but you can even be dumber by making engine sounds ... I did this with the X and she thought I was nuts but when we got in the car she actually did pretty well.
9.) rent a car !!!

My retired pilot friend came up with the perfect solution....after trying to teach his wife how to use a manual gearbox, he hired a pro. That didn't work either. She's a really sweet lady...but she simply cannot get her head around the use of a clutch & a shifter.

He just buys her cars with automatics...problem solved.

lolololo, could try a different stick shift ;)

Too bad all the rental cars here in America are automatics. Overseas you can rent a manual rental car and that would be a good start!

Let him help you replace it (or pay for it being done) and that will go a long way towards curing him of abusing any car part.

One thing that might help is to show her a diagram of a clutch. The parts manual has them. If she can visualize what is happening in makes it easier to grasps what she need to do.

If you can't spell it...you can't teach it!;)

Truly bro...get someone else to do it.

I just got a 5 speed 2003 saturn SL-2 yesterday (bought it to sell), now the GF wants to learn to drive it.

So i just ordered a new clutch.

Hahahaha.

To his credit, he did.

Same thing here. She got good at getting the car in gear and moving around, but when it rolled back even just ever so slightly she'd completely freak out. It's something that can't be done.

I would wait until after Christmas....you would hate to be fighting over the holidays.

I think Click and Clack had something about this a few years ago, but it was a teenager.
Their advise was to put the driver in the car for 30min with no keys, let them push the clutch in and shift through the gears. Then let them start the car and pull forward 5feet and back up 5 feet. This should be done at least 2 hours, before you ever get in the car with them.

man you guys are rough.

I taught my wife. We did the parking lot thing and she certainly stalled the car out a few times but she did catch on. The only real "incident" was driving through a small town one day. She had to stop on a slight incline at a stop light. Being a small town they had a bench on the sidewalk and a couple of little old ladies watching the traffic and day go by. When the light turned green my wife got off the brake to go for the gas. Of course the car started to roll back, I told her to give it some gas and let the clutch out. This was interpreted as peg it on the red line then dump the clutch. Little red beamer lights up the rear tires and screams off at red line through the intersection. I was howling, as I am sure the little old laddies $@#t thier pants. My wife pulled over a couple of blocks away we laughed about it and I continued the drive home.

We have had a number of cars since then, all manual and she has bought 2 cars herself, both with manual transmissions.

I have tried to teach her rev matching and heal and toe but she just isnt interested, I figure she drives stick as well as the "next guy" so Im happy with that.

Just pull out the juice blender in the kitchen.
Punch away at the buttons, real nice and hard ... stop - pulse - stop - puree, continue for a bit so that the electric smell starts (add in a satanic laugh for effect)

Then say, don't do that!

Reminds me of some older ladies I know, they change the car oil once a year, maybe every 2 years.
I asked them, "Do you do the same with deep fry oil?"
They said, "doh no".
So, I asked, "why?"
They said, "It either spoils with age or you have over used it".
So, I said, "oh, I see!"
And then went on that a car is the same :)
They actually have been changing the oil every 6 months since then :)

So, possibly the blender or another kitchen appliance might help :)

My wife hasn't driven one in 10 years and now needs to learn again since my new dd 330i is a 6 speed. Hopefully the "it's like riding a bike" thing is true! She doesn't need to drive it often but when I take her truck to trailer to a DE she'll have it for the weekend. She is actually excited about it.

That's damn right!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1261618956.jpg

Jeezus, I just think you solved one of life's great riddles!

Thanks!

rjp

I had my sister do it after I failed myself. Still married after 28 years.