plow boy

So one of the plow boys at my work constantly shifts the transmission in one of our plow trucks (f250 4x4) without coming to a complete stop. Imagine D R D R D R for hundreds of times per snow storm all the while the transmission tries to fight owns momentum.

2 year old truck currently has just under 3k miles on it. I give it until 5k miles until the transmission blows.

That's why the price of used pickups around here is so low. When they've been used as a snow plow, you can figure the transmission and about anything connected to it are junk.

Our plow truck basically has no brakes... to stop it you either slam it into a snow pile or jab it into reverse.

Of course, it only sees about 10 hours of use in a season.

And for the naysayers, this is at our snowmobile cottage and never is on a public road.

My 7.3 F250 plow truck has 200k miles on the original auto trans., and still shifts great. I learned my lesson after burning up the trans. on my previous gasser F250 plow truck trying to rock it back and forth after getting stuck in a snow bank. They say the diesel transmissions were beefed up considerably.

It all depends on how he does it, what the stall of the torque converter is and how the software controls it.

Most of the newer (less than 2 years as you state) just simply won't shift into the other gear, even if you put the shifter in reverse while moving forward, until it's ready so really not possible to do much damage. The transmission just simply does not obey the operators commands until it's safe to do so.

If the stall speed of the torque converter is say 1800 RPM and he's shifting D-R at a vehicle speed that is below the 1800 RPM stall speed, also not much damage to be done assuming the transmission actually obey's the operators command since it's below the stall speed of the converter so it's really difficult to shock the driveline much when there's a "soft" connection through the torque converter.

If the transmission obey's the operators inputs and the operator is driving like an idiot with the engine at/over stall speed while changing directions then it's going to be really hard on parts.

With a bit of practice on a given truck, you can get good at timing the shifts so that as you roll into the pile the transmission engages reverse as the truck comes to a stop and you just back up. Reverse to drive is a bit more tricky, but the same idea applies

you can visually see the rear end hop when he's backing up and while still rolling putting it into D

The last Deere Road grader I was in had 7 or 8 speeds and you could be in high gear going forward and slam it all the way into high, reverse and it would down shift all the way to a crawl, then engage reverse and start backing up.

The ol forklift was a different story. That thing was almost always rolling when changing direction.