After years of daydreaming and being involved with trucker forums I’m at the end of my schooling (independent school)
We test next weekend on the pretrip, backing and driving, I feel 50/50 on it, as far as if I’m going to make the grade
Pretrip I know I’ve got, straight back I got it, offset feel pretty good ….now the 90 “alley dock” is iffy but I’ll manage with a few bad points
The driving part is what scares me, because the truck has a TON of Freeplay on the wheel and they take us down some very narrow curvy roads to see if we stay in between the lines
Our most recent drive I was pushing the stick to the wall and up to catch 4th and I had a bunch of trouble with it, as did the other students, we are testing on a different truck we are used too…. because our original manual is out of service, and this truck the gears are close
I’m wondering if I can skip 4th and just go to 5, we are trained to start off from a dead stop in 3rd, like a stop sign we start in 3rd
And as far as I can tell when I need to downshift, like from an interstate down the offramp, as long as my speed is down I can pop it in 6-7 and that’s a good medium speed to take a turn with
Not sure if skipping gears is allowed, or counts against me
I really didn’t have the greatest experience at this school or the instructors, I’m hoping everything falls into place and I pass everything so I can be done with this ghetto school, they made it clear they won’t just hand out the license but their training was pretty subpar….the other students are struggling too since we had to change our test truck we had been training on
