In the future, maybe several months from now when I can put a better down payment down, I want a new 500! The thing is I want a manual trans as it would be more fun to drive I think then an automatic but I've never actually drove a manual trans as my spider is an automatic(never should of listened to my father about that! ) So, I want to learn, my friend who owns a 90's honda civic hatchback showed me the basic concept today, he was driving. lol He offered to give me lessons but whats the best way to go about learning to drive stick? No one in my family seems to know or drive manual transmissions, my dad use to have an MG in the 70's but he always complained how it use to stall on him. I'm 22 and I'm not getting any younger!
Lol... when I was 18, 3 friends and I purchased a Datsun 510 for $200 (total, not each... it had been painted with a roller, no expense spared), for the sole purpose of learning to drive stick...
Took about an hour each, so we drove it for about 8 months as the Friday Party Car... very fun.
Take up your friend's offer, spend a few hours in it and drive. The newer cars are easier still, so if you learn an older car you ar set!
Good luck
Due to recent budget cuts and the rising cost of electricity, gas, and oil, we have decided to turn off the light at the end of the tunnel. We apologize for any inconvenience.
1981 Fiat Spider, all black... "Corvino", italian for the Raven
Practice , practice , practice. Just have to find a car to get the hang of it and when you purchase a 5 speed fiat you'll be good to go. Just hours behind the wheel and you'll have no problem.
Dad might help with tips on starting on a hill ect.
Chris
80 FI spider
72 work in progress
2017 Golf R ( APR Stg. 1)
2018 F350 crew long box
If you have the basics, you just need to practice, practice, practice. I think the 500 has anti-roll back, so that takes care of the trickiest bit of starting up on a hill. Find a very deserted area and just keep stopping and starting.
If you google "learn to drive stick" the first few hits look good, there is even a site called standardshift.com here is a link http://www.standardshift.com/faq.html
Just a few really important things to remember. 1. know how to ensure the shifter is in neutral. 2. NEVER try to put it in gear without pushing the clutch in, 3. If the car starts bucking, push in the clutch. 4. You will stall when learning, it's normal, 5. Won't be long and you'll be having fun.
Everyone starts out driving a stick a little herky-jerky at first. There's a timing thing involved; increase the gas, let the clutch out. Not too much gas, don't let the clutch out to quickly. It's something that can only be learned by doing, but fairly quickly you'll have it learned and from then on it's second nature. You almost do it without thinking of it.
You do have to keep your right hand free though, in traffic you end up shifting a lot.
Ron
Ron Luxmore rlux2n2@gmail.com
'82 2000 Spider: after 26 years between Spiders.
Kingme2 wrote:Lol... when I was 18, 3 friends and I purchased a Datsun 510 for $200 (total, not each... it had been painted with a roller, no expense spared), for the sole purpose of learning to drive stick...
Took about an hour each, so we drove it for about 8 months as the Friday Party Car... very fun.
Take up your friend's offer, spend a few hours in it and drive. The newer cars are easier still, so if you learn an older car you ar set!
Good luck
I actually thought about buying a cheap integra or civic for under $1500, just to practice for a few months and then sell it but my friend thinks it woudn't be worth it. I don't know, ddon't want to buy a new car and wear the clutch out.
lol... get a rental, get your friend to drive it to a parking lot for you... you'll be fine by the time YOU return it in a few days!
Due to recent budget cuts and the rising cost of electricity, gas, and oil, we have decided to turn off the light at the end of the tunnel. We apologize for any inconvenience.
1981 Fiat Spider, all black... "Corvino", italian for the Raven
Back in 1997 I bought a Mitsubishi Mirage simply because I wanted to learn how to drive stick. I could drive it that day. I was good after 3 days and I stopped trying to remember what gear I was in after a week. It's simply practice. I'd just buy the car and drive.
Appropriate for this forum, I "learned" to drive a manual transmission car by test-driving a 131 SuperMirafiori in the middle of Toronto on a rainy day in '84. "Lots of revs" was my mantra. Still is.
1st dont rest your hand on the shiter
2nd dont rest your foot on the clutch pedal.
3rd find a parking lot with a hill in it,pratice
staring from a dead stop going up hill.
With out rolling back. If you can master
that the rest is all down hill from there.
If you know someone with a stick ride
along with them and do the shifting while
they drive
and dont even think oh holding the car at a light or stopsign with the clutch and throttle...it took one trip to kelowna to eat my highschool friends "chevy sprint" 3 month old clutch when his little sister borrowed it for a dentist appointment.....didnt even make it home on its own power, needed a tow truck!!
Regards,
Keith Cox
1973 124 Spider
1973 John Deere 500c backhoe
1987 Jaguar VDP
2013 passat tdi
2015 cherokee
There are 2 components that you can successfully separate in the learning process, and practice one first, then the other.
First: starting from a stop, in first gear, stop-start-stop-start, etc. This is to get the feel of the balance of clutch pedal and gas - nothing to do with shifting through the gears. Work your way across the longest straight stretch you can, doing this stop start stop thing. It's ok to do some wear on the clutch to learn where the "friction zone" is: that area of the clutch pedal play where the gears start to engage. You get that feeling from starting up, depressing the clutch so you are rolling slowly out of gear, then slowly letting the clutch out until you feel the gears start to engage. Get the feeling of that moment, and you will ease into your shifts very nicely. The bucking happens when you go too fast through and past that friction zone area, engaging the gears too fast and abruptly.
Second, and flowing pretty organically from the first, once you feel really comfortable with getting going smoothly in first, is to clutch, and go ahead and shift to second. You will find it goes a lot more smoothly than the first time you tried starting in first from a dead stop!
Just go back to the stop-start-stop exercise, slowly rolling across the parking lot or along the deserted long, straight dead end road, until you get the feel. Then you can move easily onto shifting up through the gears. And then you can work at downshifting. Once you have some practice with it, get back in the passenger seat with a driver who can go through the up and down shifting - you will learn a lot more from that once you have had a feel for shifting for yourself.
Learning how to drive stick is a fun thing that you and your buddy will talk about and remember for years. Wikkid is on the money with feeling the piont where the clutch engages. This is why people are telling you to do the start stop start stop drills. Once you feel the clutch engage when realeasing real slow you will learn how to give it a little more gas to avoid the stall.
I was 15 and had to drive an uncle home in a chevy work van with a column shifter. I was functional and nervous until my wife some seven years later (at 22) taught me properly how to work through the gears. If you don't live in the city and have the basics down like downshifting you may never go back to an automatic.
I've taught lots of people to drive standard / stickshift.
In addition to all of the advice above, three things that I have found helpful:
1. Explain what the gears do and in very simple terms how a clutch works. What is it doing when you let the pedal out? I usually explain that it is like sliding a spinning wheel on a shaft along until it contacts a wheel that is not spinning and then the first makes the second turn as well. A sketch helps. Sounds odd when i see it written, but if you can explain that it helps. My motorcycle teacher taught me that one.
2. I have had everyone practice starting off, on level ground, in first gear with no additional gas. Just idle speed. It teaches them to feel the point where the clutch starts to grab and to ease that smoothly. If you can do that, you can do it with gas. You won't wear out the clutch, most people grasp this quickly and the key is that they only have to think about one thing -- the clutch pedal. Not two motions at once. People are not used to operating machines with their feet. Then adding the gas pedal action in seems manageable.
3. I left starting on an incline to the end. That is the final test. Once you can start off confidently on a hill, you graduate and (in the case of my kids) can have the keys to the car without auto trans.
Oh, and stalling is OK. Everyone does it. Dont panic. And the guy who stopped 2 feet behind you on the hill has a problem, not you.
as my spider is an automatic(never should of listened to my father about that! 
) So, I want to learn, my friend who owns a 90's honda civic hatchback showed me the basic concept today, he was driving. lol He offered to give me lessons but whats the best way to go about learning to drive stick? No one in my family seems to know or drive manual transmissions, my dad use to have an MG in the 70's but he always complained how it use to stall on him. I'm 22 and I'm not getting any younger! 
