a friend of mine is doing a restomod on a '57 Ford F100 (I think) and needed a new shifter as the one that came on the '89 Mustang GT 5.0 he stuffed in there (old V8 needed too much work to be economical to fix) only came up to his ankle.
So I made a new shifter rod and bracket out of a piece of 5/8" stainless rod (scrapyard find) and some alu scrap
and then started hacking away at a piece of 4.5 x 2 x 1.75" piece of alu. Drilled it ~3.5" deep for a 3/8-24" thread (what I thought was the female thread on the end of the shifter rod), then realised that I had no way of tapping a hole that deep. Doh! So made this with spit and superglue
in action
then bored and reamed the hole 2.5" deep to 5/8" to match the shifter rod
also made a 3/8-24 set screw to join the female threads on the shifter with the female threads on the shifter rod. Only later found out it was some weird azz fine M10 thread. Doh!
so, got the shifter rod's sister, cut the end off and retapped it 3/8-24. Added a set screw and we're now set up for shaping the shifter
stuck it in a collet block then tilted and skewed it to the right angle
close up
used a 1/2" round over router bit for the ends and corners, then a ball end mill for the finger cut outs, then a hell of a lot of work with some files to finish shaping the profile
My friend politely told me that stamped numbers was not really the look he was going for, so a good friend stepped up and made me a couple of shifter medallions with the same shift pattern and numbers as the original Mustang shifter. A very big thank you! I owe you one
Boring out the recess for the medallion. Screwed up the first time (they were 33.xx mm in diameter, not the 35.xx mm my eyes somehow read on the caliper) so cut the shifter back 3mm and started again.
Ended up with a pretty tight slip fit. Tight enough that I had to use a suction cut to get it out after test fitting! A bit of JB weld and 24h later:
Next step was anodising. What a pain the proverbial that turned out to be. Took 4 tries before I got something that wasn't purple (not his style) and then it was a another whole pain in the.. to do the numbers. I tried blanking the shift pattern with superglue after anodising, but cleaning up the edges with acetone screwed up the oxide layer so the top looked like a$$ after dying. I then painted the pattern black, but machining the surface down pulled some of the paint out. ARGH! A little touch up and a coat of lacquer and we have...
fitting it to the truck this afternoon. A fun project but I'll be glad to see the back of it - it's taken a LONG time and I want to do something else for a change