In our quest to get back to working on the Elco and ultimately finishing the car, there were some things I had to dig out to use on the car. Some of these parts I've had the whole time and never took time to dig this stuff out, one of which was a shifter for the car. I had a B&M shifter that I originally had in Rustang a long time ago when the car still had a C4 transmission in it. Along with the shifter itself came the cable brackets for use on Ford, GM and Chrysler transmissions. The bracket on the cable was for the Ford C4 but since we have a 700R4, we'll have to switch over to the GM bracket. Unfortunately the body for the shifter had been trimmed down to fit the center console on Rustang so when I do install it on the bare floor in the Elco, there will be space around the bottom of the shell and the mounting base.
One of the first things I had to do was line up the base to drill holes to secure the shifter down. Even though I would be using regular hex bolts to hold the shifter down, I would not be using nuts underneath to hold the bolts, I'll have to more or less cut threads in the sheet metal of the floor using the bolts. After drilling one hole, then lining up and drilling the other holes, I was able to force thread the bolts through the holes to hold the shifter down. If this didn't work, I'd have ended up needing another set of hands to hold the bolts while I applied nuts from underneath. After sourcing a small screw and nut to hold the shell in place, I got the shell installed and the locking rod clipped back in place which allows the shifter to ratchet and lock in whichever gear is selected. It's kind of a goofy design where it requires the shell to be partly installed over the lever before the locking rod can be installed, then only after the retaining pin is secured at the bottom of the rod can the shell be snapped in place. I installed the handle on the lever and secured that, with the next thing to mess with being the cable itself. This part was a simple affair, with just a simple drilling of a large hole at the front of the hump in order to route the cable through. The cable would have to be routed forward of the shift lever on the transmission so the cable can be curved around to run parallel to the transmission where it will connect to the bracket and the lever itself. In our next episode, I'll be sliding under the car in order to curve the cable around and hook up the bracket and fully secure the cable, along with test shifting the shifter to see if it operates the lever on the transmission properly. The cable on the shifter has no skin on it as can be seen in the picture due to degradation, but fortunately the cable still works as its supposed to. I'll probably find some kind of way to temporarily secure the cable but in the future I can see me installing a carpet on the floor and working the cable under the carpet to hide it. The work continues....
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