For the few members that haven’t yet been bored to tears with gearshift knob info, the new EPCO metalflake 4 speed knob showed up today. It’s really beautiful, perfectly round, and exactly as requested. The pattern is perfect and the insert is the smaller 3/8-16 size. Old knob on the left, new knob on the right (I parked both knobs on a couple of bottle caps to hold them steady):
The core hole on the new knob is nearly invisible inside the knob both because of the smaller diameter, and also because this ball came out a bit darker than the other one:
As EPCO advertises no two are exactly alike. I like both equally. The old ball was more electric blue while the new version is more like a dark Navy blue.
In direct bright light they both look nearly the same color:
But in normal ambient they look more like this:
EPCO provides the biggest jamb nut I’ve ever seen for a shift knob. I’m sure it was meant to protect the knob where it contacts the nut, but wow! That would be uncomfortable.
So instead, I used the Hurst nut mounted upside down, after I rounded off the sharp corner indicated by the arrow. I threaded a stud unto the nut and chucked it in a power drill which was run against a D/A sander. The corner is now nice and smooth. The nut portion is so thin it can’t be detected against the ball when shifting gears, and the smoothed corner of the nut/sleeve just feels like part of the shifter stick.
That’s it for today. Two car shows over the new two weekends, so just running the check list to make sure everything is cleaned, filled, or loaded up. I just found out there’s also a car show down in Rockford, WA this Saturday. If for any reason the Mirabeau show doesn’t work out we may head down there.