Beat on this, cut that, bend those....

Yesterday afternoon we worked on the car until 12:30 at night and installed some various hose fitttings on the intake manifold and the water temp sender as well as the oil pressure sending unit. We also finished bolting up the power steering pump leaving just the hoses for that. The alternator is on too but needs a bushing to properly space out the hi-po pulley for alignment with the rest of the pulleys which I will get today.

The next undertaking was to begin installing the transmission and shifter. The transmission went right in but when it came time to install the new shifter I found some modifications were required. We have decided to pull the transmission out to give eaiser access to make those modifcations to the area to allow sufficent clearance for the shifter.

Speaking of the shifter boy am I excited. This shifter is the same road race shifter used in many high end race cars and it is by no means the same basic shifter that I have installed in countless numbers of cars over the years. It is unbelievably well built and does not use the ordinary plastic bushings and cotter pin type fasteners typically found on Hurst linkage. Instead it uses extra big linkage that are machinced with threads and saftey fasteners complete with hardened metal bushings. This is all topped of with a shorter than usual shifter that has a very short throw and feels more like something that would be used on the space shuttle than on a race car. Then it also has a handle to prevent an accidental shift into reverse and the whole shifting process feels awesome! We will continue the shifter modifications on Saturday but the extra effort is going to be well worth the trouble.

Last night as my son was helping me I couldnt help but laugh while remembering making similar modifcations to my first 57 Ford back in the 60's when I was younger than my son is today. I remember even back then thinking how much I wanted a Mustang that I could make these sort of changes to and now here we are side by side. I wonder what cars he dreams of?