1951 oldsmobile selector trans shifter

For the most part, the smaller 5 bolt trans was used by Olds, Pontiac and Buick on the smaller engined models, the 6 bolt cover heavier duty unit on the larger engines. For instance in Buicks, the 248 eng = 5 bolt, the 320 eng = 6 bolt. In Olds, the flathead 6 cyl I believe were 5 bolt, the flathead straight 8, 6 bolt. The '50 Olds was unique I think, '51 and later V8's were 6 bolt. I have one from a '55 and am interested in this thread. Very timely. Thanks to all contributors.

Ray

 

Sounds like this man crush is getting a little heavy

This should be interesting though. I have a back burner project with a 324 and a 6 bolt 3 speed, and if we can make a shifter work for johnny's then that would be wicked, cause then I can build one for mine also haha!

 

HAHAHAHA Lee! Sure man lets make a couple of them if they work ok!

F&J I dont have an olds to compare it to, we are trying to adapt these to a model A and a model T so floor clearance isnt much of an issue as we can make a tunnel....

However could someone please post some measurements of floor pan clearance and we can work it out to use on an olds.

 

Good thing is, there is no under the car yet. We're building the car around this stuff.

 

Jealous ?

 

This is the true spirit of hot rodding right here. Maybe even the hamb at its best. Dudes coming up with ideas about how to make all their junk work. No off the shelf aftermarket, no over priced ebay crap. Just ingenuity and creative engineering. Well done.

 

My prototype is done except I really think the tall shifter is too tall. The extra height just makes it feel wrong.

Let me do 2 seperate posts with pics to make less confusing.?

First post and pic deals with how I decided to mod the original side lever. In this pic, I am pointing to that area.

I first cut off the tail of the orig Olds lever, leaving just a round piece with the oval shape hole that would be hard to make from scratch.

Next, I made a very short flat lever to weld onto that round Olds piece, and aimed it "back" and "up", towards the centerline of the top cross shaft when the trans is in neutral.

On that new short lever, I drilled a 3/8 hole, then welded a nut on the back. Then a 3/8 bolt with a big flat washer welded to the bolt.

Then I made the long rear lever that welds solid to the top cross shaft. These 2 levers point right at each other in neutral.

On the lower front end of that long lever, I made a long 3/8 wide slot.

The fork goes in between the big washer and the new short front lever.

So, when the top cross shaft moves right or left, it pushes in or pulls out on the Olds selector shaft.

This setup really works good in my opinion, and probably easier to build than making that "dual fork" connector linkage shown on that old homemade shifter.....and less slop in using one fork, rather than those 2 forks on that other one?

 

Now the upper cross shaft details; Kind of confusing to describe, but study the pics for a while..

In hindsight, I could have mounted the cross shaft a bit further back which would allow it to be lower than it is. If you do that, a stock floor might be tight there too? Anyways, keep the speedo cable in mind when building this stuff.

The cross shaft is 5/8 dia round stock, and the tube it rides in is just black pipe. The pipe has 2 tabs welded to it for the 2 upper tailhousing bolts.

Yesterday I had the stick shift welded solid to the cross shaft, and it just did not want to slide over very good.

So I cut the stick off and welded 2 short pieces of flat stock to the bottom of the stick. I then drilled a 5/16 hole through the two plates and the cross shaft itself. One piece of those 2 flat stock tabs, hangs lower and rests at a "skid plate". Now when you move the stick over to the left for reverse or first, that skid deal forces the cross shaft to move over, even with the spring.

You might also see a 1/4 x 1/4 x 1 inch "stop" welded to the top of the cross shaft right above that skid deal. I had to put that there to keep the stick from falling over to the right side.

Here is the bad news: When the trans is in reverse or 1st gear, the cross shaft is over to the left....and now, the skid and the upper stop are no longer keeping the stick from having side play. It works fine, but just feels wrong because of the side to side play. I can't figure a way to fix that.

If you are building a shifter of any design, I think it might be good to build a rough prototype first to see the new problems, rather than put a ton of real fussy machining time into it and later be forced to scrap part of it.

Good news is that it does shift in a normal pattern. I did not mess with the linkage ratios and here are the movement specs:

From 2 to 3, the shifter moves about 6-1/2" inches, same when going from R to 1st.

Side movement in the neutral gate is about 4.5 to 5"

The only thing I may do is shorten the stick by 8" or 10". I am pretty sure it will just feel better than being too long. I was trying for the LaSalle or 37 Buick shifter style, but now I am going for the Hurst mystery shifter look.


More ideas would be good. Change the entire design, or parts of it?? I am out of good ideas right now

 

To bad there weren't more 37-38 Pontiacs which were factory floor shift around to convert these over instead of having to make a shifter. I'm not sure of Olds or Buick had a factory floor shift cars?

 

Not sure of Olds applications. For Buicks the transmission you want is a 37 floor shift from a big Buick. It mounts right up to a 58, 364 c.i. Roadmaster standard shift bell housing. The Buick transmissions you don't want are from old Specials as they will only fit 264 & 322's, they are the little ones. You could blow them at the drop of a hat.

 

Here are some pictures of the pre-war Ford top plate adapter by Transmission Specialists, see this thread:

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=346588

 

Here are some pictures of a Foxcraft shifter. The January 2010 issue of Hot Rod Deluxe also has an article on Nailhead shifters starting on page 84. It talks mostly about the 5-bolt trans, but the shifters are similiar.

 

Here is one based on a Sparkomatic shifter from this thread:

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=123830

 

Here are some pictures of Ansen shifters, I think they are from one Heathen had.

 

Thats the Ansen I used. Thanks for sharing the pictures.

 

Good thread with all those new pics of old shifters and links to old hamb threads.

I think it would be difficult for me to try to copy any of those dual-lever aftermarket shifters, just using those pics. Looks too complicated to even see how they work.



Also, the people who mentioned the Buick top shift trans from big cars:
I did do the swap that uses all the guts from the 51 up OLDS selector into a 37 Buick Big Series trans case/w top shift.

I was told by a guy who had a Hollanders Interchange book, that the 37 Buick was one year with the case casting number that he sold me. I don't know if that means the case and top cover needs to be from a 37 big Buick, or could it mean that some of the gears were different in between the late 30s big buicks?

That 37 Buick trans I used; it is a closed driveshaft, not open like Olds, and the input shaft and spline won't work with Olds Rocket engines. It bolts up fine to the 51-up olds bell, but won't work unless you put all the Olds guts and Olds tail housing on it.

I need to do a tech on the swap. It is real easy except the Olds tail housing area needs mods to bolt up to the Buick case. No fancy machining needed. I do have pics somewhere.

 

I still haven't made it to the store room for that old magazine article. it was based on cutting the shift linkage off a a stock column and mounting sideways on the top of the trans like your doing. here is a plymouth column that I'm saving for this application. all the engineering is done for you by the factory

 

NONAME, that looks real promising. It seems like it would be a great way to make a good working shifter.

 

You can use any Buick 6-bolt case and top from '36-'38 but you will need the high gear shifting fork from a '37-'38 so it is probably just easier to find a '37-'38 trans. See the article "Big Gears for any Engine" in the August 1956 issue of Hot Rod for details on how to put the Olds parts into the Buick case. It is available in this book (starting on page 164):

http://books.google.com/books?id=UX...81kZ9_5KCiFHOZvP7Z2yx5w-E#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Here are some more pictures of the Foxcraft shifter.

 

Here is the 1956 Hot Rod article mentioned above.

 

Here is the 1960 Hot rod article mentioned in another thread of mine. F&J has a picture of a shifter in post #15 above that he calls a Dragmaster, but I think it is a Drag-Fast. This article mentions that shifter, but the picture is not for a Buick trans like shown in F&J's post. The article in the January 2010 issue of HRD has a picture of the Drag-Fast shifter that matches the earlier post. That article also has a picture of a homemade shifter that seams to be similiar to the Drag-Fast.

 

I would sure like to see how that works. I saved the column from the car the tranny came from, so I have all the original linkage.

 

Thanks for that link. I did read the whole article and it gives a lot of "lost info" from those days.

It does clear up the year range of donor Big Buick trans cases for the top shift conversion using Selector guts.

It does add a lot of confusion if someone is trying to do the Olds guts/Buick case/open drive. I say that because a lot of those mods they did were to put the trans behind a SBC. When just doing a hotrod trans for an Olds Rocket, only a few things are needed.



Going off topic a lot here, but worth mentioning:

One thing it does confirm is that in that short few years from the SBC coming out in 1955, to maybe 57 or 58 when Chevy finally made a 4 speed performance trans, there just were no standard shift transmissions for the SBC that would hold up....so you had to make your own.

Titus started a thread in the last year about a strange aftermarket bell housing adapter to fit a SBC. He was looking for application info. Some thought it was to put a Hydro up to chevy, but chevy already had that in trucks. As I think I said in that thread, I thought it was made to use a 50-only Olds bell with LaSalle trans pattern, or a 49-55 Caddy bell with LaS pattern, so you could run a LaSalle trans behind a Chevy. And I thought that it would have been made right before Chevy made the 4 speed.


Great posts you all are making. Lots of good info posted, (for the future of traditional rodding), that is very hard to find.

 

Look at ebay item # 120647776814. It a shifter for a Holden. Could it be for a one armed bandit?

 

In 1964 as part of the Hot Rod Magazine Technical Library, HRM published a supplement titled “Clutches, Transmissions, Rear Ends". There isn't much specific information about the Buick/Olds transmissions other than one picture, but there is an interesting table showing all aftermarket shifters and what they fit. I've attached it as a PDF. It isn't entirely accurate because it shows the Ansen shifters fitting Buick upto '63, but Buick stopped using selector transmissions in '60, but Olds used them through '63. I have also attached a PDF of some pages from a 1966 Ansen catalog showing their Posi-Shift selector. If you look at the part numbers you will see that '39-'60 Buick and '51-'53 Olds are the same. Also, the '41-'48 Olds and '39-'54 Pontiac are listed as the same.

 

Here is the HRD article from January 2010 titled "Backing a Baby Nailhead". It has a couple of pictures of floor shifters. I had to split it into two parts.

 

VERY GOOD THREAD!

I broke down the ansen shifter in my head a little bit, its actually alot simpler than what you might think, the most complex part is having the same joint go forward back and side to side


Firstly to get the shifter gates working it has a crab claw shaped plate with a bell crank on it that goes to a ball joint that is connected to another bell crank and another ball joint assembly attached to the gate arm moving it forward and back

second is the shifter arm to select the gear which is welded to a shaft that goes through the shifter handle

this next part because I couldnt see it well is what I imagined in my head

in this way it allows the shifter arm to move forward and back and the handle to move side to side using materials easily available to everyone

 

Re thought my idea a little if I welded a 3/8 breaker bar drive end to a shaft had one end extended to weld on the gear selector lever, ran the shaft through 2 heim joints it would allow fore and aft movement, and side to side movement. The side to side movement would operate the crab claw bell crank which operates the gate selector.

sorry ths is so crude

 

^ I can't seem to grasp what the drawing means, but a couple of years ago, I was thinking of using a mini steering U-joint to try to reverse the backwards pattern on that simple Drag-Fast? shifter picture that was posted.


I keep thinking simple is the way to go to cut down on work but also reduce slop in having less parts?

I did just come up with an idea for a totally different shifter that is centered right at the side lever. The main side lever will do all the shifting, and the lower lever will just be used for a spring to allow spring tension when you move the handle to the 1-R side. I don't have the proper size heims here, but maybe I could make a wimpy version just to show.

Geez, I have so many other things I really need to do this time of year