Ok. I need my shifter to be accessible because my Turbo 400 is a full manual. So I can't just stick it in gear and go. I've thought about electric shifter kits and air kits. But they're all pretty expensive. That Moon push****on shifter doesn't fit the style of the car and I just don't like it. Besides that, it's more expensive than the electric/air shifter kits. I don't want to change trannies or valve bodies. So... I need ideas on where to put the shifter in my car. I can't get it between the seats. The ****** tunnel is removeable, so that's a bad place because I'd have to remove the shifter every time I wanted to get at the transmission - besides that the only place on the tunnel to put the shifter would be between my legs. I can't put it on the left side of the driver's seat and still get in and out of the car. If anyone has any ideas or pics of unusually located shifters, please post them. Thanks!
make a detachable bracket that is held together with pins that mounts the shifter in the center. the mount could all be bent out of 3/4 .120 wall dom with a plate on top for the shifter to bolt to and a small brace on the side. weld 2 peices of 1" .120 wall dom tubing in to the floor sticking out of the floor about 2" with a 5/16 hole drilled threw it and the shifter mount for quick release pins.
The floor's all aluminum. I can't weld to it, but it's a good idea and it could still work. I just don't know how much I want the shifter between my legs.
Early Corvairs had a little shifter/lever for their automatics that was mounted on the dash, probably worked with a cable like most floor shifters do. I should think something like that would be handy and incon****uous and easy to do, no matter what kind of car your doing (you didn't say).
It's the Austin in my icon pic. There's pics here: http://www.austruk.com You can see in this pic where the shifter used to be. There's going to be a seat there now. So the shifter has to go. Matter of fact, it's already gone. It's kinda laying around in there now. I was thinking of something sort of "dash" mounted myself. But there's no dashboard.
Thinking a little outside of the box, have you considered mounting your shifter on the roll cage and using a long cable? You could even mount it with the handle hanging down and operate it like the flap lever on a small aircraft.
Yeah. I'm thinking that I'm going to have to do something with the column drop. I need to make a new one because the steering wheel is getting moved more to the left. The car was almost center steer when I got it. So there needs to be a new drop made. I was thinking I could incorporate a shifter mount into that. I was also thinking of hanging it upside down off a piece of bar or plate stretching between the rear door frames. There's no headliner, so the whole inner structure is exposed. What structure there is, which isn't much. With the column drop version, I thought I might hang the shifter almost vertically, so you'd have something like the early Chrysler in dash shifters. I checked. I can as long as a 12 foot cable.
Is there absolutely no room between the seats? a bandit shifter is less than 2" wide and is a mirror image type shifter that can mount right or left hand.I also have an old B&M that is only about 1 3/4" wide but it needs to be repaired before it could be out in service. I looked at your link but dont see any useful pics of what the limitations in the interior are. How about overhead on the cage.Morse cables(Push/Pull) like any shifter cable are available in many lengths to accomodate almost any weird thing a guy can dream up. Or how about a column shift?
There's just enough space between the seats for the shifter to fit, but not enough room to shift it. That means moving it forward onto the transmission tunnel and then you get into interference between the shifter, the seats, my right leg trying to get to the gas pedal, the p***enger's left leg etc. That's where I got the idea of putting it between my legs which will make it (even)hard(er) to get in and out of the car if it's mounted directly on the floor. If it was mounted on the floor, you'd have to lean forward in the seat everytime you wanted to shift and if you mounted it up higher on a box or some kind of brackets so it's an inch or two off the floor, then you're just not getting in the car. That's when I tried putting the shifter on the left side of the driver's seat. It seems like it would work, but you can't get in and out of the car with the shifter there. Well, you could if you were willing to put the car in 3rd everytime you wanted to get in and out, but with the shifter in Park, the stick is in the way. There's about a foot of width between the seat and the rollcage tubing. You have to grab the tubing with both hands and slide your way under it and into the driver's seat. If there's anything in that 12" of space, unless you're really skinny (and probably under 5' tall), you will not get in the car. Getting out of the car is even more fun. Column shifts are out. I don't have a real column anyway, I have a bare steering shaft from the steering wheel back. I'll take some pics so you can all see what I'm talking about. Pictures taken. They basically ****, but it's the best my camera will do. Picture 1 shows how tight it is getting in the car. Picture 2 is the distance between the seat and the "firewall" Picture 3 is from the p***enger side. The shifter is sitting on the p***enger seat. The p***enger seat sits forward of the driver's seat because of the rollcage. The p***enger seat is also not cut down like the driver's seat. It will be, I just haven't done it yet. Picture 4 is me sitting in the drivers seat.
After study of the pictures on your website, I think you could use the right column drop brace to mount brackets to bolt an upside down cable driven floor type shifter that uses a bolt on Hurst like handle, so you could place the shift knob where it falls readily to hand, as this car looks like a compe***ion drag car and the shifter position should in the easiest positon to use to make it safe. If you're going to change the column drop anyway, the use of a stock OEM (your choice of origin) mast jacket with a shifter (with the shift arm connected to a bowden cable of some sort for ease of installation and maintenance) and maybe even an ignition switch is certainly the way I would go.
It was a race-only car. It won't be raced anymore. It's in retirement. I think the shifter is going to go next to the steering wheel, to the right of it, probably on a bit of an angle with the back of the shifter pointing down a little. The shifter is a reverse pattern Hurst Quarter Stick. In Picture 4, the steering wheel is over to the left about 2" from where it was when I got the car and it should go another inch left to be lined up right with the new driver's seat. So there's plenty of room to the right of the wheel for the shifter to mount to a plate on the new column drop. It might be slightly unusual, but the whole car is unusual.
Install the shifter right where it sticks up through the floor and do your shifting from there. Let your p***engers fend for themselves.
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