Pictureless progress

I did start work on the shifter. It went smoothly enough, though one hole on the mounting plate seems to have been stripped out of the box. I suppose I could have done it, but I really don't think so. I got the mounting plate on, and I had it located farther to the rear of the car than the one other guy who has used this AOD transmission before. I thought it would look better with the shifter farther back in the cockpit.

It turns out that included in the shifter kit is a new replacement for the transmission selector arm. I decided to try to replace it as the instructions indicated but I could not loosen the old nut holding it on. I had tightened this nut before when I had to flip the selector arm to be pointing up a few weeks ago, and I guess it got too tight. Anyway, there just seems to be no way that the offending nut will ever get loosened. I tried every tool possible to no avail. Penetrating oil did not work. I thought about using heat, but ended up deciding to modify the existing arm to connect to the new shifter linkage. I used my cutoff wheel to remove part of the old arm but left the main part and bushing I needed to work with the new stuff I had. The good news is that it seems to work. The bad news is that when Nathan and I tried to testfit the cockpit, it was going to be in the way of the fiberglass tub. So I will have to re-engineer something else.