Brent Expert

Date registered: Apr 2006 Location: SW Colorado USA Vehicle(s): '13 Wolfsburg GTI Posts: 1754

| RE: 406 Unimog 20 speed trans shifting
First thing to do is get an owners manual in english, unless of course you can read German then you can get one of those.
There is no real art to it. What you have is a six speed gearbox with two sets of crawler gears. You will likely never need any of the crawler gears. First gear in the standard range has approx 80:1 reduction. I start out in third, sometimes in fourth.
It is hard to describe until you are sitting there looking at all of the levers. You have the big stick for the main shifting. All the way back furthest right should be the forward/reverse selector. You can reverse in first or second, you can not shift past second without moving the selector to forward again. Ahead of that lever furthest right is the crawler gear range selector. Shifting it forward gets you down, one or two steps as needed. Then to actually engage the crawler gears, move left one selector, sort of in the middle, and push it forward to engage the crawler range you have selected. Back next to the 4wd and locker lever is the PTO engagement lever if your truck has PTO's. I think my truck has 6 shift levers, and if you have PTO's yours should as well.
I think the only pitfall to the operation is not engaging the crawlers at any speed above a crawl. You could definately hurt something. The lowest ratio gives you something like 350 ft per HOUR. It is time consuming to to watch
Enjoy the new toy! |