ok...call me a dope..I love the look! I can’t stand the ratchet , drag car, looking shifters of the day. I know Lokar..but I remember a lot of cars running Hurst Indy’s, B & M, and the lowly Mr Gasket shifters..I’ve never ran either..I always had a Manual trans or shifted from the column..B & M seems like the logical choice. I’ve heard you can “sharpen” the indents? Anyone have any links? I really think I’m gonna go this way with my car
I'm using one in a 41 Willy's, perfect for the look of a 4 on the floor cheat, not the best shifter to use if I'm honest, hard to use shifting manually, ok if you just stick it in d and cruise.
I put one in a truck once years ago...never again. I dont know if sharpening the indents will fix it? The problem seems to me to be that the lever is just too long, there is no way to get enough resistance in the movement to prevent shifting it accidentally.
I just got an UNadvertised Summit shifter. Way at the back of their shifters, have to say it's well engineered, good detents, park/neutral switch included, even brackets are well engineered. (it's slated for floor mounting, but some simple bracketing will mount it astride my 350 T.H. tranny. Floor hole will be...minimal. Love this shifter! Around $140... I'm changing the stick, don't like the flat Hurst style, not in MY truck! A short, handy tapered round stick with the right knob...my bud carved one of my head, complete with handlebar moustache!
On the detent style shifters like the Mr Gasket 3/4 speed Automatic or the B&M UniMatic, there is no plate with "detents" in the shifter mechanism to file deeper, as the OP suggested. If you want to have the shifter provide a stronger feeling of detent in each gear, you have to drop the pan of the transmission. The trick here is to get yourself 2 or 3 more of the spring finger with the roller on the tip that fits into the detents on the rooster comb on the internal linkage. Cut the roller end off the extra fingers, and bolt them over the top of the existing roller finger, to add more pressure on the roller tip. Just like stacking more leafs on the rear leaf spring. It will never be fool proof like a gated or ratchet shifter, but it will be a good bit better feeling. Just don't get carried away, just like a stock column shifter you can still easily overshift it in the heat of battle. For a ratchet shifter that looks a lot like the B&M UniMatic, take the B&M Z-Gate and throw the plastic covers away, then fit the whole lower mechanism under a large Hurst or similar rubber or leather shifter boot. It then looks very much like a Hurst Verti-Gate inline manual shifter, with the T-handle and T-trigger lock-out for reverse. No way to overshift that, got to lift the T-trigger to get from Drive back to neutral or Reverse.
The Jalopy Journal
