Shifter Decision

The pushbutton shifter option won’t happen for now. If and when I get the car running and licensed I’ll see if I can make the buttons easier to shift, but my first priority is to make faster progress on the things that can be accomplished.

The decision to go with a floor shift meant I had to clean and paint the manual shift version of the upper dash board, and I completed that this morning. Now I need to make progress on as many of the firewall and under-dash tasks as possible.

Holes in the firewall for the AC lines and heater hoses are cut, and I finished mounting the evaporator. The wire bundle pass-through hole size and location still needs to be established, but I’m first going to order the switches and console relay/fuse panel, to help determine what wiring can stay inside and how much will go through the firewall.

The stoplight switch on the stock ’56 is hydraulically operated and mounted on the master cylinder, but that has been changed to a disc/drum dual reservoir system. For the new setup I used the switch from a ’79 Aspen and designed a bracket to mount it under the dash to be mechanically operated by the brake pedal.

I did get more wiring installed on the dash bundle, but progress is slow. It’s very time consuming and confusing trying to meld and configure wire bundles from ’56, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’81 and 2001 Mopars, a full set of aftermarket gauges, a modern sound system with GPS, relay controlled headlights, power seats, power windows, and all the non-stock interior lighting and wire routing. It will have roughly three times as many circuits as the stock ’56 Belvedere, so it will require both battery and switched 12 VDC busses for fuses under the hood and inside the console. The battery will be relocated in the trunk to make room under the hood for the relay panel, and for better weight distribution, so that adds a new dimension to the wiring. I’m nearing completion of the dash wiring, and even got the GPS antenna mounted atop the new dash. It's ugly, but necessary.

I visited the upholstery shop and told him I’d like to have the seats about the first week in May, but it remains to be seen if I will be ready for them, or if he completes them by then.

Monday morning I took the rear bumper wings and windshield wiper bezels in to be re-plated. The highly rated shop I originally planned to use in close-by Gainesville apparently shut down, so I had to locate another place in Fort Worth. They quoted a fair price, and the shop was neat and organized, so I have my fingers crossed. He wasn't excited about having to do the pot metal bezels, but if he can plate them with no more defects than were visible up on my repair and polish job, I'll be happy. More and more plating shops around here are closing rather than spend the money to comply with federal law, and those that have survived have really jacked up the prices.

I picked up two pairs of 5-1/2" Kenwood speakers so I could install the wiring, then discovered they only included 12" of wire for each speaker! I managed to scrounge up 50' of speaker wire, so at least got that part covered