Project V8 RX-7: Part 8 – The Shifter & Some Engine Dress Up
by Jeff Naeyaert
Hey guys! Long time, no write.. I’m sorry. We’ve had a lot going on and recalling the last episode of Project V8 RX-7 I hastily titled it “Bringing the E-ROD LS3 to Life (Almost),” which unless we were going to do a lame “(REALLY Close Now)” followup article, committed us to have a running engine by the end of the story. Unfortunately, there turned out to be a lot of things we still needed to cover before turning the key—so much so that our article would’ve turned into a novella and lost the attention of even our most devout reader by page 12! Thus, Project V8 RX-7 Week was born!
We’ll just break up that one article into 5 easy to digest parts and by Friday if something doesn’t go horribly wrong along the way you should expect to see an E-ROD LS3 brought to life (For Real)!
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| Now that we’ve gotten through all that boring wiring it’s time to get back to some fun stuff! |
If you’ve been following along you’ll remember back in Part 5 we chose to run Tremec’s Magnum transmission. It fits in the car great and there are a number of different configurations for moving the shifter around to suit a variety of applications, unfortunately even at its most rearward position it’s still about 4 inches too far forward for our RX-7.
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| You can see the shifter that came with out T-56 Magnum is at its rearmost arrangement on the shift rail but the shifter can (probably) be flipped around to utilize the further foward shifter cup. A shifter can also be mounted in place of that plate even farther forward on the transmission should the application require however none of these arrangements place the shifter far enough back to be ideal for the FD RX-7. The standard T-56 shifter is probably 2 inches farther back than T-56 Magnum at its most rearward position. |
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| We’ve already carved out our shifter opening for the old T-56 that used to live here but even unbolted and slid back a little the T-56 Magnum shifter isn’t anywhere close to working without modification. |
Sure we could use an offset shifter that comes back a few inches before coming up through the hole in the transmission tunnel but then we’d be left with a funky shift throw. Shift feel and smoothness were some of the main reasons we went with the Magnum over a less expensive T-56 we could have picked up used–we don’t want to lose that. So we scoured the Internet for alternatives and came across this beautifully machined piece by SIKKY Manufacturing on a 350Z forum pictured below:
Unfortunately this shifter was manufactured as part of SIKKY’s LSX 350Z/G35 Mount Kit which 1) is for a 350Z or G35 and 2) fits the shifter block of a GTO style T-56 transmission.. Very similar to the transmission we’re using, but not similar enough to bolt up or be redrilled to fit. We could only hope they were MotoIQ fans when we gave them a ring and told them about our project.
