Gear selector

The gear selector or shifter if you're American arrived a few weeks ago but it's taking a lot of fiddling to get things how I want them.

It's quite a simple and retro looking thing more in keeping with look of a Cobra whilst clearly not a replica item!

It comes with prettyuch everything needed to fit it to the car however due to the width of. The transmission and mine being a right hand drive, as it stands it's too far on the passenger side of the tunnel.

You can see the rod linkage on the rhs down the side of the transmission case. This has limited scope to allow the lever mechanism to be adjusted to drivers side.

Herb who runs Shiftworks is an incredibly helpful person and sent through a lever arm with 3/4" more offset to help at no charge from the US.

It's still not far enough so I am going to implement part 2 of the plan which is to introduce a dogleg pair of bends into the linkage rod to give the offset with appropriate clearance.

I've already done this once on the original  GM part so I know it works. Whilst the dogleg will stop the easy adjust reverse thread setup that the rod ends are set up with, I shouldn't have to adjust this once I have it setup right with the neutral safety and reverse light switching tested.  See below.

Now it's just height clearance to resolve. As I've decided not to mount on the fibreglass tunnel for strength and vibration reasons I need to fit a couple of steel supports to the tunnel cage to mount the shifter on.

These will be welded to the frame so that I don't have additional bolts to worry about in a tight space - thankfully a helpful neighbour has a portable arc welder so I will have to have a few practice goes to remind myself how to weld again and then commit!

I want to have the shifter as low as possible so that any protrusion of the shifter chassis is easily masked by a leather gaiter / shroud thing without it protruding upwards too much - hopefully the 1 1/2 inches at the moment should be ok. The overall position feels good when I sit in the chassis in seat position. The manual car builders don't have these issues - there's one position for the gear knob and that's it! I feel envious of this at the moment.

So this is the near final position, you can see linkage dogleg on LHS, the selector knob is central to the chassis. There is room to adjust if need be - all this is then translated into where I cut the slot in the transmission tunnel fibreglass to enable the body to go on. Technically I could have left this till afterwards but much easier to do now.

The final part of this puzzle is to manage the neutral safety and reverse light switch wiring. I am torn between having these running inside the body - easier to get to but a pain to cover over - or outside the reverse. If I sort now I can put in convoluted tube and lead back to engine bay relatively simply along side the transmission leg of the engine loom.

Above a rough sketch of how the neutral safety switch will be incorporated into the starter circuit providing illumination to Engine Start switch when only in neutral and park - and also only enabling the start switch for the same conditions. One thing I want to do is enhance that so once the engine is running the start switch is disabled too but that needs a bit more thinking about. Probably a line from the alternator charging / not charging indicator is a place to start.

Finally the immobiliser will need adding to this somehow but I'm not publishing how that's going to be done!