Replacing your classic hauler’s manual gearbox with an automatic tranny is a popular and practical swap, especially when an engine upgrade is part of your buildup. When you make the slush box switch, you have a wide and varied choice of shifters to suit just about any interior look or driving style.
Lokar offers one of the trickest setups to grab auto-box gears right through the original floor-shifter’s hump hole. The Lokar rig is both practical and retro-cool. It’s practical because in many applications you don’t have to modify the tranny hump. You can vary the shifter position to match the hump hole. And the Nostalgia shifter is ultra-ool because it has the same double-bend most vintage trucks’ floor shifters had—only the Lokar stick comes in gleaming chrome. It’s definitely double-take time when somebody checks out your cab. Hey, I thought you said you had an automatic?!
The Nostalgia shifter is available for Ford, GM, and Chrysler (Dodge) automatics, and the basic installation procedure is similar. We also liked Lokar’s Transmount Emergency hand brake. Like the Nostalgia shifter, it has a vintage look finished in bright chrome that bolts right to the shifter’s mounting bracket.
We first saw the Lokar shifter/e-brake setup when we took our 360 V-8/TorqueFlite 727-equipped ’42 Dodge to Full Tilt Street Rods for a Wilwood hanging pedal installation (CCT, June 2000). We asked Clay Mullis to wrench the shifter and hand brake into place, too. As the following installation highlights show, the shifter is basically a bolt-on, and you might easily be able to do the work yourself, depending on your particular truck/tranny combo.