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.
Good thing we didn't sell the extra '66 GS four-speed setup we had lying around. We needed it to mock up the stock shifter to take measurements of where the stick was supposed to protrude through the floor relative to the tapped holes in the tailshaft (where Hurst shifters mount). Here we're using a dial caliper to measure the distance from the center of the stick to the plane of the tailshaft mounting holes. We later used these measurements to make sure the new Hurst shifter stick was oriented close to the stock location. | 
Next, we paged through Hurst's shifter catalog to find a shifter combination that we felt would work on the GS. OK, we didn't really page through the catalog--instead we clicked through the online version that's available in .pdf format. Check out www.mrgasket.com/hurstcat.htm (first you may need to download Adobe's free Acrobat Reader from www.adobe.com). It turns out Hurst had two Competition Plus shifter kits for the '65-'66 Buick Skylark GS, but the fact that they were specified for Saginaw or Muncie transmissions had us thinking they were Chevelle kits. The only four-speed available on the '65-'66 Skylark GS was the T10, which wasn't even listed. Time to dig deeper. |
We called Hurst's tech line and discussed our dilemma with one of the reps. He felt that the Muncie shifter specified for this application would work fine. The rest of the package, including the shifter mounting bracket, rods, and arms, was available in the separate installation kit. We were certain the Muncie installation kit wouldn't work due to differences in the T10's shift arms and rods, but we were pretty confident that its shifter mounting plate would correctly locate the shifter in our car. What to do? We checked out another factory T10 application--the '60-'63 fullsize Chevy--and found that it used the same mounting plate as the Buick Muncie kit. Success? A picture tells a thousand words, so we downloaded the instruction sheet for the Chevy kit 373 4734. It looked like the right choice, so we placed the order. | 
After receiving the kit in the mail, we installed the works on our spare T10 to measure where the Hurst stick would protrude through the floorpan. Furthermore, doing so facilitated adjusting the length of the shifter rods. We sure wish Hurst would supply a metal pin for locking in the Neutral gate when making these adjustments. The plastic pin doesn't fit as securely in the guides, which makes it harder to adjust the shifter for bind-free operation (tech tip: a 1/4-inch drill bit works better). Our educated shifter-kit guess was close, but the shifter assembly ended up being about a half-inch too far toward the driver, and a quarter-inch too far rearward relative to the stock shifter. Hmm. |
Darn, not close enough. The shifter body was resting against the rear portion of the floor hump, which caused a nasty resonance at speed. Oh well, we thought we'd spend a couple of hours in the machine shop fabbing up a new mounting plate to bring the shifter forward. That idea was canned, however, after realizing that moving the shifter any farther forward would cause interference with the crossmember. Grrrreat. The solution? You guessed it--floorpan mods. We really hated to do this to our Buick, but we found that we could remove and relocate the factory hump to the proper position by drilling its spot welds and rewelding it to the base floorpan. Extra effort, yes, but this allowed us to reuse the stock shifter boot and keep the car looking stock. The hump was relocated a half-inch toward the driver and a half-inch rearward, but it's totally undetectable. Really. | 
This isn't the Hurst shifter handle you were expecting, eh? Clever cutting and welding of some bar stock allowed us to adapt the stock handle to mount on the Hurst shifter. |
After completing this fab work, we learned that Auto Krafters offers a trick adapter to accomplish this very same thing. Live and learn. The important thing is that we've got positive, shorter-throw, bind-free shifting in our Buick--which leaves us lacking one more excuse for not running this thing at the track. | |