Thread: Something I've Always Wondered...

It's normal -- but does it do any damage to anything?

I guess my question is, who here DOESN'T disengage the clutch when putting the car in neutral while in gear?

Maybe I've been doing something I don't have to do, which is push in the clutch when going to neutral. Is it needed?

USE THE CLUTCH TO PUT INTO AND OUT OF GEARS. Don't pull it out just because you can, your tranny is gonna **** out on you. Your going to pull it out one day and go into another gear and boom! haha

I ALWAYS engage the clutch. Taking it out of gear, putting it into gear, getting slow enough that car starts bucking otherwise.

I know a few people, non-Nissan owners, that shifted and and took the car out of gear without the clutch. On one of the cars you could stick it in first, then move the stick to the right and you were in 5th gear.

Our transmissions are prone to the 5th gear popout. I feel like forcefully taking it out of gear will help the popout happen sooner.

If you pull it out of gear with the clutch still engaged (ie, the motor is still applying torque), no more harm should be done than if you had put the clutch in. Shifting INTO gear without disengaging the clutch will actually cause wear, however.

This.

There are situations where proper rev-matching will not produce any more wear than using the clutch. You just have to get it right, every time. I've driven cars that actually like upshifting without the clutch and slide right into gear. With 260K miles on the trans and still shifting smoothly. However, most SERs I've driven don't like shifting without the clutch.

Sliding out of gear into neutral without load will not cause any damage. Just don't do it while under strong accel or decel and you won't create any issues. I do it all the time cause I'm lazy. 80% of the time I come to a stop by sliding the shifter to neutral. Never had any ill effects in any of the cars I've owned.

Quite a lot of different views here...Some people saying it doesn't hurt the tranny at all. Other people saying NEVER to do it.

I'm still confused. Guess it was a better question that I thought hehe.

-G

Driving a manual is all about developing your own techniques. There are a lot of wrong ways to drive it too. Like a lot of people think they must keep the car in gear and clutch depressed while on a stoplight.

I press the clutch to be safe, There have been times when I accidentally took it out of gear. It didn't seem like it was nice to the car.

Here is one thread with useful info, not quite on topic with the question though: NeroSoft - Software, Dogs, Cars, Airplanes, Fun and More

my gear dont pop out and the transmission doesnt shift out of gear without engauging the clutch nor would i try to take the gear out of gear into neutral

This is the closest to the correct answer I've read in this thread.

Pulling the transmission out of a gear into neutral with the clutch pedal depressed and doing the same without depressing the clutch pedal are effectively the same thing as long as there is no load on the transmission. Depressing the clutch pedal takes the load off of the transmission so the gear deselection will be easy and free of harm to the dog teeth.

If there is any load on the transmission however it will be harder to deselect the gear (you will have to tug on the gear selector) and you will do a little damage to the tips of the dog teeth as they separate. The tips of the dog teeth will grind a bit depending on how much load is applied to the transmission and how quickly you disengage the gear. You will not hear the grinding. It will be a single event, not a prolonged grinding that you're used to.

In reality it is quite hard to have zero load on the transmission. You can't be accelerating or engine braking at all. This is why depressing the clutch pedal is the easy thing to do to get the load off of the transmission.




As for shifting into a gear from neutral without using the clutch this is possible but you're going to be relying heavily on the synchronizers to speed-match the gears to avoid grinding the dog teeth to a pulp. If you rev match perfectly (which is quit hard) you're going to avoid a lot of the wear on the synchros and the gear selection should perform without much trouble. You're going to want to double clutch and rev match to completely avoid the over-use of the synchronizers but that obviously defeats the purpose of not using the clutch.