6 speed Manual: down shifting to first when climbing hills

Sometimes when I'm climbing a steep hill in second gear and the car ahead of me is going slow, I feel like the engine is lugging bad and won't rev. Is it safe to shift down to first? I come from a manual car and I've never had to shift below 2nd when climbing. I'm not trying to complain. I absolutely love this truck. Just wondering what your guys thoughts are. Also, I'm really curious about ovtune or a regear but I'm worried about warranty troubles down the road. I live in a city with a lot of hills so I end up on steep hills at low speeds pretty often.

 

really just depends on how fast you're going... If you are in low RPM in 2nd then down-shifting to 1st won't be a problem.

 

Yeah of course it’s fine to downshift to first. It can be difficult while moving though. I have to jump the rpms up to where I think they’ll be (I guess this would be rev matching?) and then it’ll slip into gear.

 

Thanks. I'll give it a try. Might take some practise to get good at rev matching climbing a steep hill.

 

You'll do less damage in 1st gear than stressing the engine in 2nd.

 

Yeah it’s tricky but you’ll get better with time. Your speed will drop a little bit but thats ok.

 

If it’s lugging, let that be the sign you need to shift. Don’t feel bad about that. Non issue.
Regear would also help with those rpm’s too. My opinion about the warranty...factory warranty it doesn’t last forever but you would also get warranty from whom ever is doing the regear.
In all my years of driving, and that’s a lot and owned a lot of various vehicles, I’ve never had rear diff or axels problems that ever required warranty service.

 

If you have a hard getting into first, learning how to double clutch should help.

https://www.yourmechanic.com/articl...hift-a-manual-transmission-car-by-jason-unrau

 

The tune makes second gear way better. It’s fairly easy to bog it on the factory tune. I’ve been tuned for 70k+ miles with no issues, well worth it and a noticeable improvement

 

I really want to go with the ovtune. I haven't heard of any issues with people running into trouble at the dealer with it and a lot of people are running it so it's probably a safe bet. 3 of my buddies have the exact same truck so we could split the cost of the cable/software and just pay for the tunes.

 

I have downshifted into 1st at about 30 many times. Mainly because I couldn't get a smooth downshift with the stock accumulator and wonky DFCO. With the ADM, I was just doing it because I now could.

There's no harm in doing it, if you can do it smoothly.

 

What's a dfco and ADM?

 

Truckers would have called it "double clutching" - disengage the clutch to take it out of 2nd, reengage and increase the revs to bring the transmission gears up to the appropriate speed, quickly disengage the clutch to move into 1st, reengage and away you go.

 

The accumulator delete mod and the function that turns off the injectors when coasting. The OV Tunes made a big change there.