watch that back, nothing worse than pulling a back muscle on the first day of the project and then spending the next few days laying on a heating pad when the weather is nice outside.
“Oh should I use the tow setting on the transmission of the pickup truck? Terrain would be hilly for most of the trip.”
I agree with @dagosa and BTW…that tow setting just turns your overdrive off which you should do anyway when towing or driving on hills. I wonder if they charge extra for the name?
@missleman
It does that for sure and more depending upon the make, year and model of the truck/car.
It can alter the shift points for all gears when accelerating and automatically use engine braking and downshift when going down hills. On a truck I used at work, it literally took over shifting at all times and not just during acceleration. The idea was, OD was avoided not only for the strain on the drive train but for the lack of engine breaking and control. The only time I felt “out of control” with this feature was towing while on snow covered roads. But then, regardless you will anyway. If you rent or borrow a vehicle with this feature, it really pays to read the operators manual to see exactly what these features do. Sometimes, especially in tow vehicles rated for very heavy loads, they can be set to do a lot more then just lock out OD if they actually have a “tow setting”. I was some impressed the first time I used at the urging of my boss when on a delivery of a full load of soil. It takes the decision making totally out of down shifting and using engine breaking when carrying heavy loads, making it much easier to modulate braking and stay under control. This is a big feature done manually on large rigs that has, over time, filtered down and done automatically on consumer trucks.
One of the reasons I prefer American brand name Trucks over Toyota, Nissan etc when it come to heavy towing, plowing etc. is not that these vehicles all don’t do equally well Model for model, but Ford and GM sometimes offer features in their pick ups that seem to filter down from their much larger brethren that you can find particularly useful. This “might” be one of them.
I noticed that the towing button caused all of my shift points to increase in RPMs before shifting to the next gear, and I believe the engine braking going downhill was affected as well (its been a month or two so I am not so sure about the latter).
That seems reasonable.