Accelerating too much while releasing the clutch pedal or changing gears without fully pressing the pedal causing the gears to scratch are other bad habits related to the manual gearbox that can be very expensive.
Breakdowns in the manual gearbox and the clutch are usually very expensive, so it is advisable to be careful with these elements, knowing how to handle them and
avoid mistakes that can wear them down or break them prematurely. Although it may seem silly, accelerating too much while releasing the clutch pedal or changing gears without fully pressing the pedal causing the gears to scratch are habits that can be very expensive. For this reason, experts from
Autocasion They analyze five typical mistakes to avoid:
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Keep your hand on the lever constantly: We must always keep our hands on the steering wheel and only release it when we are going to change gears. As soon as we have already changed gear, leaving the hand on the lever causes both the mechanism that transmits the movement of the lever to the gearbox and inside the gearbox to wear out. This is especially pronounced in cars that have the gear selector very high and from which we ‘hang’ the arm. Sometimes it’s not very expensive to damage the steering gear, it’s enough to change a few cables, but it’s also easy to have to repair the transmission itself, a bill of more than 1,000 euros for the bad habit of resting your hand on the lever, which which is also a mistake from the point of view of driving safety.
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Keep your foot on the clutch pedal: Another bad habit is to have your left foot resting on the clutch pedal instead of on the footrest. Although it seems to us that we are not stepping on the pedal, the foot has a certain weight and we are stepping on it lightly without meaning to, which increases the wear of the clutch actuation mechanism and also of the disc. In addition, this habit also means that the cruise control can sometimes malfunction and inadvertently deactivate it when pressure is detected on the clutch pedal.
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Watch out for the reverse: Reverse gear requires an additional pinion to reverse the direction of rotation of the wheels and this complicates its mechanism, as we explain in this report on why reverse gear makes noise. With it we make two serious mistakes. The most serious is that sometimes, due to the rush, we don’t wait for the car to come to a complete stop before engaging reverse gear, which causes the gear to scratch. Other times, also in a hurry, we make it scratch because we don’t give enough time for the sprockets to stop turning after pressing the clutch pedal. Every time the reverse gear scratches, we have to imagine a dentist turning our teeth without anesthesia, because that’s what we do to the gearbox, To engage the reverse gear correctly we must have completely stopped the car, we press the pedal of the clutch and wait a couple of seconds before trying to engage the gear, that way we avoid scratches.
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Do not put deadlock on arrests: When stopped at a light, many drivers leave first gear in gear and wait for the green light with the clutch fully depressed. This puts a lot of wear on the clutch actuation mechanism and also carries other hazards. If at that moment something scares us or, for example, we get hit from behind, we will instinctively release the clutch pedal and the car will start moving, with the risk that this entails. Also a cramp or simply that our foot slips can cause a dangerous situation. Also, in modern cars with Start & Stop, this bad habit causes the system to work incorrectly. The correct thing is to put neutral and release the clutch pedal at stops.
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Hold the car on a ramp with the clutch: This error can destroy a clutch in a matter of seconds and many people have this bad habit of keeping the car on a ramp ‘feeling’ with the clutch pedal and accelerator. If we do not want to move, the right thing to do is to be in neutral and with the brake pressed. Holding the weight of the car on a ramp by slipping the clutch drastically shortens the life of the clutch. A brand new clutch we can render useless in less than two minutes by doing this stupid thing.