Bob's Bug - If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again!

Hmmm. Somehow Murphy always works his way into these projects, especially when you can most do without his presence. When I first got this car home I realized it was once an AutoStick - you can read about my clutch tube installation in an earlier post. The remainder of the conversion (sourcing a manual tranny, replacing the shift lever and shift rod, converting the engine, etc.) was apparently done before, according to the previous owner, who claimed he knew the car was once an autostick but that it had been driven as a manual car.

Well, the fact that I had to supply a shift lever (none came with the car) should have been an indication that the shift rod hadn't been changed. Once I installed all new mounts on the tranny and installed it (not pictured), I installed the shift rod, shift lever, reverse lock-out plate, new shift bushing, and shift coupler. Then I realized the shift rod would not meet up with the "hockey stick" on the tranny.

So, to get out of this bind I decided to modify the transmission coupler to accomodate the shorter auto-stick shift rod. After two tries, I got it right. Basically I welded a 7/8" OD, 3/16" wall thickness steel tube to the new shift coupler, drilled it out to 5/8" ID, then drilled and tapped an 8mm hole for the special coupler bolt to thread into the "hockey stick". The trick was getting the length and the offset of the 8mm tapped hole right.

Anyway, in the end I found a winning combination and can shift through all the gears.