The Hurst Pistol Grip - History And Evolution Of The Musclecar Era's Most Iconic Shifter

so let's talk about one of the most iconic devices from the classic muscle car era the Hearst pistol grip shifter a Chrysler exclusive introduced in 1970. so in 1970 it was the high water mark of the original muscle car or the first muscle car era in 1970 was the year that Chrysler went all out as far as the image stuff goes that was the year of the introduction of the e-body all of the colors the wings the Shaker Scoops the trapdoor air Grabbers the hood pins and the pistol grip shifter so to tell the story of the pistol grip you really kind of got to go back to the beginning of the shifter the force the Chrysler four-speed era 1964. to see how it all evolved and answer the question why was there never an a-body pistol grip shifter or was there Okay so 1964 Chrysler introduces the aa33 four-speed previous to that everything was three speeds it was also the first time there was a floor shifter involved in our quote okay wrong about that uh it was the first time a transmission a Chrysler transmission was equipped for a floor shifter 1960-62 the original Valiants and Dodge Lancers had a floor shifter but the floor shifter was actually mounted to the floor with the linkage drives running through the transmission the a903 and a745 which were the three speeds in use at the time didn't have any provision for a shifter mount So to that point everything was done on the column an exception to that would be the three speeds that they used in the 1963-62 and 63 Max wedge cars but we're getting away from the point 64 they introduced the a833 4 speed and in 64 it's available behind every engine in the lineup with the exception of the 170 slant 6 and the three team poly head for whatever reason but it was available in the a b and c Body Lines and I'm going to do a whole video on c-body four speeds so for the time being we're just going to leave them out of the equation here and only talk about the A and the bodies so 64 in the anab bodies the shifter the Chrysler used on the 833 four speed was a nice state-of-the-art Hurst good quality shifter they used a very conventional looking one in the a-body cars very similar to the one they used in 1969 and later and the bee bodies used a gooseneck sort of Hearst thing they came up out of the floor like this and it came over a little bit to the driver and just stood up nice looking shifter but they were expensive so Chrysler we're going to save a few dollars in 1966 switched all the four speeds over to the Inland shifter the Inland was not a good move the Inland shifter had a reputation it had a lot of nicknames over the years the guesser gear the wet noodle shifter anybody who's ever had a car a performance car or tried to put an inland shifter you know through the paces knows how bad they were they're fine for just driving around you know good Cruiser no problem but you take this thing to the drag strip but you're trying to bang some gears with it and they just don't want to go third gear get in third gear successfully on one of these shifters is just an act of luck regardless of how skillful you are so 1968 they used to use the Inland shifter in 66 and 67 across the board and the early part of 1968 but now they introduced the roadrunner and the Super Bee initially those cars had the Inland shifter but now you've got a whole new group of people coming over to the Mopar Camp buying these muscle cars and these shifters they just junk so Chrysler Midway through 1968 switched back to the Hearst unit and it was a conventional Hearst looking around stick looking very much like the 64 or so uh a body shooter the difference the cost difference between the Inland shifter and the Hurst at the time was forty dollars a unit so you could you know you think about it that that adds up that was a nice chunk of change in 1868. so mid 1968 1969 they go to a conventional Hurst shifter but it was you know normal it was like it was like mundane it's like you know you need something extra here well one of the engineers over at Chrysler for his own car carved a pistol grip handle out of Walnut put it on the car and showed it to his friends and they were like this is it we need this in production remember this is all amping up this is all leading up to 1970 where they go crazy with the image and the things so they take this hand over it was hand carved on a walnut handed to Hearst and Hurst gives them back the pistol grip that we know today and from what I understand it's pretty true to the original carving of the handle couldn't use a round stick with it that didn't work so what would a rectangular stick in total there were four versions of the pistol grip shifter three of them were available in 1970 and two of them never made it past 1970. so the original or most organic incarnation of the pistol grip was the one found in the e-body so now here's an interesting thing up until 1969 the tail shifts used on the four-speed Transmissions only had one mounting pad so you see on the top is the a biting one and that's going to be important in a couple of minutes the bottom is the B body one so beginning in 1970 they added a second shifter mounting pad to the back of the tail shaft and it moved the mounting pad a little bit closer to the center of the car and the e-body console which later became the b-body console the e-body console had the hole for the shifter a little bit further back and look closer to the driver than the b-body consoles at the time so it's really the most organic or naturally fitting of all of the pistol grip setups it puts the shifter right pretty much right at the driver's knee more or less a little bit behind the knee it's right there at your hand it's not the best position if let's say you're under six foot and you can't put the seat all the way back because your your fourth your your second and fourth gears are a bit back and so you got to move your your arm a little bit further back than you want to but if you're a six footer it's just exactly perfect so here's here's the setup as it would appear on a 1970 e-body so here's the shifter mounted at the back of the tail shift and here's the unused part where I should say the b body location for the shifter so that incarnation of the pistol grip with the shifter mounted all the way at the back of the tail shaft and the short shifter was the one used from 1870 through 1974 on all of the e-bodies and then from 71 to 74 on bodies with bucket seats it's the most common of all of the pistol grip configurations now I said there were four versions of the pistol grip three of them were available in 1970 two of them never made it past so so the basic four-speed pistol grip is found on a bench seat car and the Roadrunner is the Super Bees they were all stock with bench seats you can order buckets but they were bench seat no console cars and the standard shifter for that was this one here now remember the basic console was used for both the automatic and the manual transmission cars in the opening that the shifter would come through was far forward and in the center unlike the e-body and later B body console which had the shifter opening back into the driver's side so if the shirt that comes through in a natural position so for the 1970 and only 1970 b-body console cars they came up with this thing so what this shifter does it's crazy it comes up out of the floor of the car and it makes a hard right comes up through the console and then angles back over to the driver so you've got this basically an s-shaped shifter extremely long but more important than extremely long it had leverage that worked against you so in other words your first to second year pull is straight back it'll do that no problem but when you go to Power shift this thing from second to third the S shape on the shifter is trying to force the linkage remember you've got the leverage of this really long stick it's trying to force the shifter to go back into first and what it'll do is it'll it'll hit the neutral section of the linkage and stop it there to successfully power shift the 1970 console pistol grip second to third was really luck there was no skill involved in it it was luck if you wanted to try to make that shift in addition to pushing forward on the shifter you know pre-loading the shifter ready for the power shift you also had to twist it against that rotation that the S is trying to make it go into terrible shifter there was a second problem with this also because the shifter was so long it gave the driver too much leverage over the shift Forks inside the transmission so remember now if you're going to power shift the transmission I'm gonna start pulling the shifter back or pushing it Forward against the gear before you hit the clutch well with the console pistol grip the thing was so long that that same pull that same amount of effort that you would put into a standard you know regular regular shifter regular four-speed shifter well it Amplified it so much that those cars ended up with more from the knot when you got into a four-speed console pistol grip 1970 car the transmission was sloppy they'd make noise because what would happen was as you're you're trying to put it through its Paces you're twisting and pushing against the shifter Forks and with much more effort or much more leverage than they're intended to so you really don't know your own strengths when you're driving one of these things and because of the way it's it's situated it kind of forces you to drive aggressively that's the whole thing with the pistol grippers all right go so that configuration only lasted the one year 1970. now in 1971 they redesigned the B bodies and in that case when you've got a bucket seat car you've got the console and it has the e-body shifter position which again is really the most organic situation for the pistol grip shifter but for the bench seat cars they did something interesting and then here's here's where the The Unborn a-body pistol grip comes from it appears to me the Chrysler had intended at the same time that they put the pistol grip and the bee bodies that they were going to also do an a body version but they never did it for whatever reason sometimes they'll hold things back just to push the buyer the potential buyer to a higher priced item so if the pistol grip shifter is the attraction well only make that in the more expensive cars and don't put it in a cheaper cars I'm only speculating that that's why they did it but 1971 the shift that they used in the b-body bench seat cars would have actually been a perfect fit for the a-body cars so here's here's the car here's the uh the 1971 through 1974 bench seat b-body shifter and here it is a kit supplied by Hearst so if you want to buy one of these things brand new this is what you're going to get so if you notice it has this dog bone shaped bracket so that dog bone shaped bracket takes the shifter body itself and moves it back and up when it's bolted in the car so if you took this shifter and mounted it right to the b-body pad on the 833 tail shaft it wouldn't fit the car at all in order for it to actually fit and come through the hole it has to be moved up and back well this dog bone bracket right here puts it so here's the B body position that dog bone bracket moves the shifter back and up to where it would be on an a body so the 1971 through 74 B body bench seat pistol grip which is actually an a body shifter that they adapted for the later B body so it never saw production in an a body but it's an exact fit you do need the right plate to orient it you need the right shifter bracket to orient it correctly on an a body some people have used the as I've seen so many times people use a console an e-body or a b-body console pistol grip to short handle and an a body but the problem with that now is it first and third well first the shipper is oriented like so you're almost pushing it down to shift forward but first and third are in in Reverse or even or so far forward you almost have to hit your passenger's foot to get into third gear but if you do want to put a pistol grip in an a body the one to use is the 1971 through 1974 b-body bench seat shifter and there it is in its natural habitat it's the best looking of them and having lived with all of these shifters and so many different configurations over the years I will tell you point blank the 71 through 74 B body gives you the best feel overall the e-body location the short handle it's very tight it's like it's it's it actually doesn't even really it has a it doesn't feel like a Mopar shifter because mobile shifters are known to be a little on the sloppy side a little long throat so it almost has like a General Motors kind of feel to it but it's it doesn't have the right position the most comfortable position it doesn't give you the right amount of Leverage to work in 833 which is a bulky kind of transmission but that's 71 through 74 Peabody bench has just the right length and it's in just the right position that in my opinion it's the perfect pistol grip shipper the downside to these things there's very little downside to them they're beautiful shifters nothing screams muscle car more than a pistol grip shifter if there's any downside to them is that they do feel cheap you know it's funny it's one of those things where it plays with your mind a little bit when you look at a pistol grip shifter and you can almost feel the wood yeah they're sculpted in such a beautiful way and especially the way your thumb lays over you know because you've got the grips that your fingers are going to go over but there's this whole section in the shifter that your thumb and the inside of your thumb lays against they just feel so natural and tight and you look at it you say well that's gonna feel like wood right but it doesn't it has it just has a cold plastic shape feel to it and as these things age as they go through you know just regular normal Heating and Cooling Cycles Summers and Winters you know the plastic will kind of like distort a little bit and it'll start to vibrate if you you go back to the day when these things are all around as used cars like they were all like six seven eight ten years old there was always match books and stuff like that stuffed up between the Chrome and the plastic to keep the things from vibrating it was just the normal thing it did with us but if there's any downside of relative pistol grip that's it it's a fantastic shifter so and then that was the end of it 1974 e-body was gone the pistol was gone the B buddies we knew it was gone and when the pistol grip shifter went so did the last of the the real Spirit of the Mopar Muscle Car era in my opinion all right that's it this one on all different twists and turns right I hope you got something out of that I'll see you tomorrow

Channel: Uncle Tony's Garage

Views: 60,170

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Id: P7m1CXYWuKM

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023