|
Resting your hand on the shifter is not a problem by itself. A weighted shift knob is not an issue at all, there's not enough force to matter, but if you rest a 10lb arm on the shifter, it can cause the stick to deflect slightly from it's intended position.
Easy explanation:
Deflecting the stick potentially causes an internal part of the transmission shift mechanism to drag. Its like starting the shift motion, but only just holding it there. This is bad, don't do it. If you MUST rest your hand on the shifter, keep a light touch and make sure its not moving. Shifting and occasional stick movement isn't going to hurt anything, but constant drag can.
Technical explanation:
Inside the transmission, each pair of gears shares a shift fork (move the stick left to choose the 1-2 fork, stick center is the 3-4 fork, stick right is the 5-6 fork). Each shift fork kinda looks like the letter C and pushes a synchro fore or aft to engage one gear or the other. The C shaped portion rides in a groove around the synchro so the synchro can spin freely, but still be pushed into position as necessary. Once a gear is engaged, the shift fork is meant to simply rest in that position (held in place by the the synchro groove) until the driver forces it to disengage that gear.
Resting your hand on the shifter can cause the shift fork to drag against the groove in the synchro, causing abnormally high friction as the oil is scraped away. Eventually, this can gall/break the shift fork and prevent it from moving the synchro properly, which manifests itself as weird shift problems, grinding, popping out of gear, etc.
|