Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback
My son was already aware of the various shifter mounting options and it was our original intent to get the shifter handle as close to the factory position as possible. We even hoped that we'd be able to use the 4-speed hump without cutting the floor up. But... ... before we ordered a shifter we decided to make sure the original 4-speed location was what worked best. Reading online it seemed that the shifter action was going to be quite a bit different from the 4-speeds we were used to. We weren't sure if running an extremely long shifter arm wasn't going to create issues.
Some of the other pictures I've posted of the floor looked as if the floor was full of rust. A lot of what you saw was a combination of the orange-ish brown glue residue, dirt and insulation. There was some minor surface rust also but these floors are new sheet metal. After a quick cleaning with a flapper disc they look pretty good again. I'd used a little flux core 110 welder when I'd welded in the hump a few years back. Even those welds looked fairly nice.
We rethought maintaining the original floor location and decided to install one of the bucket seats to see if a new spot wouldn't work as well if not better. We left the shifter in it's rear most position and held onto a rubber mallet imagining it was our shifter handle. Throughout the seat adjustments (forward & back) it actually seemed to be a decent location. Knowing it wouldn't look stock we still felt it was a viable way to go.
Our next step was to see if we could gain enough clearance in the transmission tunnel to fully raise the Tremec into place. Although we hadn't gotten to the point of setting the drivetrain angle with an angle finder we knew we were way too low. In order to go higher we needed to start cutting the tunnel. First we enlarged the opening for the shifter. Then we started cutting out the old 4-speed hump. I tried to be as careful as possible because I hoped we could salvage part of that hump and use a stock Charger shifter boot.
We still had clearance problems. The transmission has several tabs on the housing that I didn't want to cut off even if we weren't going to need them and the top of the transmission's main body really needed to be higher than we had it even when we were against the bottom of the tunnel. Eventually we ended up cutting the tunnel out and we'll have to fab a new one now. I'm pretty sure we'll still use part of that hump I salvaged though.
My son was already aware of the various shifter mounting options and it was our original intent to get the shifter handle as close to the factory position as possible. We even hoped that we'd be able to use the 4-speed hump without cutting the floor up. But... ... before we ordered a shifter we decided to make sure the original 4-speed location was what worked best. Reading online it seemed that the shifter action was going to be quite a bit different from the 4-speeds we were used to. We weren't sure if running an extremely long shifter arm wasn't going to create issues.
Some of the other pictures I've posted of the floor looked as if the floor was full of rust. A lot of what you saw was a combination of the orange-ish brown glue residue, dirt and insulation. There was some minor surface rust also but these floors are new sheet metal. After a quick cleaning with a flapper disc they look pretty good again. I'd used a little flux core 110 welder when I'd welded in the hump a few years back. Even those welds looked fairly nice.
We rethought maintaining the original floor location and decided to install one of the bucket seats to see if a new spot wouldn't work as well if not better. We left the shifter in it's rear most position and held onto a rubber mallet imagining it was our shifter handle. Throughout the seat adjustments (forward & back) it actually seemed to be a decent location. Knowing it wouldn't look stock we still felt it was a viable way to go.
Our next step was to see if we could gain enough clearance in the transmission tunnel to fully raise the Tremec into place. Although we hadn't gotten to the point of setting the drivetrain angle with an angle finder we knew we were way too low. In order to go higher we needed to start cutting the tunnel. First we enlarged the opening for the shifter. Then we started cutting out the old 4-speed hump. I tried to be as careful as possible because I hoped we could salvage part of that hump and use a stock Charger shifter boot.
We still had clearance problems. The transmission has several tabs on the housing that I didn't want to cut off even if we weren't going to need them and the top of the transmission's main body really needed to be higher than we had it even when we were against the bottom of the tunnel. Eventually we ended up cutting the tunnel out and we'll have to fab a new one now. I'm pretty sure we'll still use part of that hump I salvaged though.
