One of the challenges an automotive engineer faces is designing parts that work well for anyone who may drive the car. So it makes us wonder who designed the manual gearbox shifters on mid-'60s GM cars, because they don't seem to work well for anyone. Some genius thought it was a good idea to bolt the shifter body to the transmission crossmember. Problems arise, however, when the motor is run up to, say, five grand at the top of Second gear, causing the motor and trans to rock on their rubber mounts and bind the linkage rods, which prevents the shifter from making the Second-to-Third-gear change. Rational minds would believe the engineer was fired on the spot, but in reality, he or she was probably promoted through the corporation to the team that ultimately designed the Chevy Vega.
Our '66 Buick GS was saddled with this infamous factory shifter, which became sketchier after the Reverse lockout cable snapped. First gear and Reverse suddenly looked and felt a lot alike, and gear selection became a crapshoot every time we let out the clutch. So we did exactly what any gearhead would have done in 1966--we called Hurst to order a Competition Plus shifter kit for the Buford. Well, we found the company no longer makes a kit for the '66 Skylark GS cars, probably because they were the last intermediate-sized bastion for the old Borg-Warner T10s and rare enough that no one would even notice--except us. So we had to do a bit of sleuthing to come up with a pile of shifter parts that, once assembled, would fit our GS.
If you want your oddball factory musclecar to shift better, or if you want a factory-fit shifter for the custom trans in your street machine, you'll want to check out how we went about our detective work. And if you've got a Chevelle, we hope you're amused by the extra effort B-O-P guys endure for the relentless pursuit of performance.
