Anyone build there own floor shifter

Bump. Planning a similar setup for my 3 speed. To confirm the Vertical when forward is r/1 and back is 2/3?. Horizontal forward would be gears r/2 and back 1/3?.

 

Not quite, I'll explain it with transmission shaft rotation to make it easier to explain. The horizontal shaft is the selector which determines which gears the vertical shaft shifts. The selector has to be shifted first. CW makes the vertical shaft be Rev/1st and CCW 2nd/3rd. So if the horizontal shaft is CW then the vertical shaft will be CW for Rev or CCW for 1st. If the horizontal shaft is CCW then the vertical shaft will be CW for 2nd or CCW for 3rd. Also to note the selector shaft is spring loaded in the CW direction only. The selector shaft does not have a neutral position. This means the selector shaft is normally in the CCW position. I hope this is helpful. It sounds more complicated than it actually is.

 

Well, I've got to be honest here; I did't even know the MOPAR folks had this kind of trans. I knew the Olds/Pont and maybe the Buick people did (???), and a shifter for those are non-existent these days. You built your own, now patent the thing and make them commercially available. You have talent, and skill, and deserve all our respect. I am Butch/56sedandelivery.

 

Makes sense. Are you still planning a run of these for those who want them?.

 

Old thread,but I gotta admit that is some very nice work by the OP. HRP

 

Might have posted this before, but I didn't see it in this thread or the one that was linked to.
Back in the early 60's, my first school car was a 1950 Dodge. 4-door, ugly gray.
I wanted to make a floor shifter for it, and after looking in Dad's Motor's Auto Repair manual and crawling around under the Dodge discovered the Selector Type transmission that Chrysler put in more than just a few of their cars.

Had a '49 Plymouth sitting around that was robbed of its engine, but the transmission was still in it.
I plunked that down on the bench and began thinking about making the shifter. It was actually simpler than I imagined.
As the shifter is no longer around, I made a CAD drawing of what it was; relying on 50 year memory cells....surprisingly, there were a few left.

The neat part about this layout was that as you shifted from 1st to 2nd, the spring-loaded "selector" lever had a tendency to rotate CCW (up) which helped to make the transition smoother. It never hung up.

 

Nice design, simple to make and easy to use.

 

Nice. That's the way the aftermarket one from the late 50s basically worked. I think the aftermarket ones had a bracket attached to the trans for the shifter to pivot on and slide up & down giving the shifter more support. I was going to build one similar to that but I wanted mine to have a standard shift pattern.

 

Ebbspeed

Sent from my SM-G900P using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

So... did Cool-View ever make any for sale?

 

Last time he was on the HAMB was a year and as half ago, 3 days after he posted that last comment.

Fascinating.

 

Hello CV,

What a nice looking shifter set up that you made. It has a lot of quality stuff and machining. No fancy machining or ball bearing joints for us. In 1961, I made two floor shifters, one for a 51 Pontiac with auto trans and one for a 3 speed column conversion to floor. The 51 Pontiac was the test mule in our Auto Shop Class. I had borrowed a similar hydramatic transmission and made cardboard pattern in class. The steel plate was cut and shaped to fit the side of the transmission. We used some of the existing linkage and arms. The main shifter arm lever was tapped and installed. It was bolted and welded together on the table, everyone in the class was asked for their opinions while practicing with the shifter as it sat bolted on the transmission. A real test mule for a couple of weeks in class.

Finally, I made a long floor shifter handle after installing it in the car. Two versions, a straight stick and one that was curved. The straight stick hit the dash, so the curved one moved nicely. The second shifter was made for a stick shift car. We disassembled the column linkage and changed some of the long arms to fit the basic same side plate mounting bracket. I can’t remember, but we followed one of those articles in a magazine for the mechanical parts. This was a little difficult because of the different shifting arms. We looked at other versions of floor shifters on other cars and got some good ideas for our build. This time, it was installed on a bench seat using a similar curved lever like the stock 4 speed levers from the factory. We went to a dealer to make paper patterns for the curvature off of the factory shift lever. Most of the linkage connectors were from the stock set up, but flipped over.

Jnaki

Did those shifters make me want to go into business making them? Well, not really. It was all about having fun designing and completing a difficult project. It was a project for a simple “A” grade in that Auto Shop class. Also, it was a cross over into the other fun class, Metal Shop.

An old JC Whitney Catalog sold cheapo shifter kits for $19.95 but, that was a lot of money. A girl we knew worked for the local telephone company. $20 was 1/3 of her weekly salary back then. So, using free metal plates, rods and levers was the least expensive way to go to get a cool floor shifter back then. Plus, it was an “A” GRADE each time. I definitely needed those grade boosters for a better GPA.