don't always work. case in point, useless (mostly) bit of info for you; I assumed that since the part number for the little arm that comes out of the steering column remained the same between the old and new colums that all I needed to do to hook up the Flightomatic properly in my '55 coupe was to get a shift rod from a Hawk with a Flightomatic. Wrong! It worked beautifully but was about 1/2" too short. So what I ended up doing was taking the shift lever that was in the car - I assume it was from the same '63 Lark that donated its engine and trans - and clamped it in a vice and took a BFH to it and straightened out the bends in the middle of it, then re-bent it to match the Hawk shift rod. Then I test fit it more than a few times and tweaked it as necessary to make it actually work correctly. Et voila, shift rod that doesn't hit the gas pedal rod. Only took me half the day and much frustration, and probably
10 test fits to get it just right.Fortunately, the throttle pressure linkage is connected to the bellcrank, not something connected to the body of the car, so hopefully that one will not fight me so much.
Only downside is that I was hoping to stop by this cruise in tomorrow night - not that it's incredibly exciting, but it's literally a mile from my house and I don't know any local car nuts, plus last week there was a guy there that supposedly had a line on cheap powdercoating and I didn't get a chance to talk to him. Car is still at JP's because I didn't finish up until after 6 and I didn't have a chance to adjust everything perfectly; it's shifting into high at about 50 MPH under light throttle which sounds nice but is probably not ideal for gas mileage.
I did find the source of one of my frustrating leaks; apparently the little cover plate over the governor is leaking. I wonder if someone was messing with the governor? the trans seems to work 100% fine EXCEPT I have never seen an automatic kickdown to first gear...
nate