Shifter install

Before I owned this car, someone had done a hack job on the floor to make room for a shifter of some sort. They cut a big hole in the floor, and cut off the mounting brackets for the stock SS shifter console.

Years ago I made some crude patches for the hole in the floor, and a friend of mine brazed them in for me. That took care of the flintstones effect, but I was left with the worn-out ratchet shifter that came with the car. The shifter was attached to a piece of steel strap that was attached with screws to the seat brackets. It was a pretty rickety setup.

I got the front part of the SS console with the car, but it was not installed because of the missing brackets.

I didn't have the original Powerglide shifter setup, so I went with a Hurst Quarter Stick shifter...but I wanted it to fit in the original console. The only way that it would fit under the console was for it to be recessed into the floor slightly. So...

Here is the console where it should be:

The replacement for the frontmost bracket. The holes in the floor just ahead of the bracket are for the condensation drain tubes that were part of the AC unit that was originally on the car. That was long gone by the time I got it.

The rearmost bracket is missing also

Someone hacked up part of the shifter hump, I repaired this a few years ago. Not pretty, but much better than the ragged torched hole that was there previously.

This is where I want the new Quarter Stick to be in the console. The tape is to mark where the shifter mechanism is. I will need to make a box underneath the console with those dimensions for the shifter to fit into.

I didn't have a welder, and my friend with the brazing setup was long gone, so I got a small brazing setup at Sears. I managed to braze the new front bracket into place without setting anything on fire. I'm not very good with it, and I was going through the disposable bottles of oxygen and fuel pretty quickly. Not a great plan.

After watching the classified ads, I found a used Miller MIG welder. This ought to make the project easier!

More mock-ups. I cut a rectangular opening a little larger than the Quarter Stick base into the front of the shifter hump. Then I made a pattern from some thin cardboard, and then transferred that to some thin metal that was easy to bend. The mockups were done with the thin metal bracket to make sure everything cleared the way I wanted it to. I centered the shifter in the console hole, and then checked the fit with the seat. It came too close to the seat when the shifter was all the way back, and the front of the shifter hit the bottom of the console. To correct both problems, I angled the floor of the bracket downhill so that the front edge was lower than the rear edge. That solved the seat to shifter clearance, and got the shifter body down below the console. The front of the bracket was now hitting the transmission though. I had to bend the front edge of the bracket up to clear the transmission tailshaft.

×Finally...some progress! This view is looking down from directly above the shifter hump. The next step was to fill in the original shifter hump opening with a 'C' shaped patch that lined up with the rest of the rectangular opening.

Once I was happy with the thin metal bracket, I flattened it back out and transferred it to some heavier sheetmetal. I also added some nuts underneath to attach the shifter to

Then I tacked the new bracket in. The rear edge of the bracket is flush with the original shifter hump surface. The front edge cuts down into the transmission tunnel a bit, but ends up leaving a nice opening that I'll put the shifter cable through.

Here's what it looks like with the shifter bolted in place...

...and with the console installed...

I built a new rear console bracket and welded that in to support the back part of the console.

×More progress...rebuilding the seat bracket that a previous owner cut up for shifter clearance (along with the floor...) Some of it was cut and removed, but luckily some of it was just cut and bent out of the way. I bent what was left of the bracket back into place, and a friend of mine brazed it back together when he brazed in the floor paches for me. Those repairs helped, but there was still a lot of metal missing from the original bracket:

And here is what it looks like now that I've added some patches. I still have some more work to do, but it's a whole lot better than what I started with!

×Some more welding and grinding...a bit of paint...and:

I decided that the metal bracket that I made was too thin...so I made a new one:

If you are going to try this yourself, here are some things to watch out for:

- Front/rear positioning - The opening in the console pretty much matches the size of the shifter, so there isn't much room to move it. Too far forward, and the rigid end of the shifter cable will rub on the bottom edge of the console opening. Too far back, and the shifter will hit the seat before you get all the way back to 1st gear. It doesn't help that I'm short, and need the seat up most of the way

- Left/right positioning - There is more room to work with side to side, but if you get too far towards the right, you start to run into the transmission tailshaft. Too far to the left, and the shifter hits the seat in the low gears.

- Angle - This is probably the trickiest one to get right. I got some additional clearance with the seat by angling the nose of the shifter down. You need to angle it enough so the rigid part of the cable doesn't hit the console, but not too much or you'll run into the tailshaft.

To do this right, you need to make a bracket, tack it into place, connect the shifter cable, mount the console and the driver's seat, and make sure it doesn't hit anything. Then you take it all apart, tweak the bracket placement, reassemble, and try again...and again...and again. In the picture above, I didn't have the shifter cable hooked up...that was a mistake, I did end up with some interference betweent the cable and the console.

In the picture below, you can see the final bracket. What looks like a wrinkle in the front right corner is actually intentional. I cut off the corner and filled it in with an exact fit to the shifter base. That bought me a bit more clerance with the transmission, so I could tilt the shifter down just that little bit more.