Had a few people interested in how I modified my gear shift so thought I’d put it up and let you guys have a look.
I actually opted for buying a second hand gear shift from Pick and Pay less so if I destroyed it, it wouldn’t matter.
The object of the whole process is to move the ball which is the pivot point of the shifter up which increases the throw down the bottom thus shortening the movement made by your hand at the top. As you can see I didn’t go sick I’ve only moved the ball up about 3cm which is plenty and makes a big difference moving it up any more would make it difficult to distinguish correct gears and have good control and also increases the chance of snapping the lower area of the shifter.
Firstly removing the gearshift, I just removed by gear boot to allow access to the area but you can remove the plastic surround which extends up to the centre consol. After this there are 4 nuts and bolts which actually hold the shifter in place, you obviously need to remove these but the key here is not to drop anything unless you have really small hands or a younger sibling on hand, I on the other hand had to use pointy nose plyers. One point for those of you who drop bits and think it’s ok to leave them there don’t or you’ll end up with an annoying rattle and you’ll have to pull it apart again to fish them out. After you remove the nuts and bolts the metal surround that they are holding on should lift off the shifter and then you need to move the shifter into 1st or 3rd gear to focus on the small wire circles just underneath (see picture) You need to insert pointy nose plyers one side into each circle and open the plyers out to extend the space between them enough to allow you to move the shifter up releasing the ball at the very end of it.
Ok now you have it out of the car you’ll notice that you have the metal surround which contains a plastic bush and also a plastic piece that is inserted from underneath into the metal surround which keeps the metal ball in place and flush against the plastic bush. Once you remove these you have two options on how to move the ball, you can either heat the metal using an oxi torch or something similar if you have it or you can beat the living crap out of it with a hammer (tool of love) like we had to do.
I had my brother in law help me, so he moved it up little bit it still seemed sturdy so I installed it back in the car and tested the throw to see if and how much more it need to be moved. After we achieved the desired throw which ended up being just above where the teeth etched into the metal finish, you can move onto welding. I went with a full weld rather then just trying to tack it and I also went both the top and bottom of the ball.
This is where you guys gain some insight, when I went to re-install the new shifter I realised because we had raised the ball this extended the length of the lower area which resulted in it hitting the metal plates below what would be the completed gear mechanism, stopping it from accessing the gears correctly. We tried just using washers underneath the surround to raise the whole piece up but this resulted in the plastic piece which is inserted from underneath as mentioned before falling out which still results in the gear shift falling back down – same problem again. To rectify this my brother in-law constructed a new metal plate.
which I must say turned out pretty damn good to install underneath the completed unit to keep the plastic in place allowing the unit to be raised up as much as needed to let it move unrestricted. With the thickness of the plate we chose to also add 10mm washers to give the extra height we desired.
By the end of it all we had shortened the throw of the shift from 1st to 2nd and 3rd to 4th from 130mm to 74mm and it looks something like this.
for the OLD and NEW
click the bottom pic on this page
http://www.cardomain.com/ride/727141/3
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