Well, I wrote up a modification and installation of a Hurst ProMatic II shifter in the Mighty Duke and posted the darn thing by accident in T O/T. I asked Cliff to move it over here when he sees it, but until then if you're interested, go to https://www.fiero.nl/forum/Forum6/HTML/022405.html and take a look.

John Stricker

I moved this over here because I know a lot of the tech folks never go to O/T.

Do you like the looks of Rodney's Hurst shift lever? I think it looks nice too, but how about the real thing for the automatics?

One of the parts stores had a Hurst Pro-Matic II that a customer had returned and some of the parts were missing. They had a tag on it for $60 so I decided to see if I could make it work. The Pro-Matic is nice because it's built pretty stout and has a ratchet action from 1-2-3-N as well as a positive reverse lockout without any type of trigger.

Mounting it, physically, was no problem. The real problem was making it move the shift arm the correct amount for the ratchet action to work and still get it to go into park and reverse as it's supposed to.

The first step was finding out just what was going on with the stock shifter. Measurements were made of how much stroke there was at the shifter cable at the shifter. Also the arc the linkage ball was making and it's radius. Measurements were also made at the back on the shift arm to find out how many degrees to each detent, the amount of physical travel of the cable, and the angles involved.

I spent about 4 hours on a cad program finding the best location for the mounting brackets and lengths that were required. I'm not going into all that here because in the end, it took a fine tuning process to make it work.

I don't believe you could make this shifter work without using the adjustable style automatic cable. We used the stock Fiero cable and that required a custom adapter to be made to move the attach point to further to the front of the car as well as over to the passenger side. Here's what one of the prototype brackets looks like, and it's close to what we ended up with except the top holes ended up being about .9" further back and slotted for an inch for more adjustment.

Here is what the completed assembly looks like at the transmission. As you can see, adjustablility is the key. We set it up with the transmission and shifter in neutral and then locked everything down. Several things had to be tweaked. You can see where the cable mounting bracket has been cut and the angle changed. The mounting point has also been moved from the outside of the transmission case to the inside and even further to the passenger side by mounting it on that side of the new adapter bracket.

It took quite a bit of work, but it seems to work well now and is very crisp, looks a lot better as well, although I doubt the Mighty Duke notices the change in looks.

John Stricker

Looks good! I have been thinking of changing the shifter to an aftermarket version as well.
So from what I understand, The shifter itself mounts normally, But you need to make the mods at the trans for the cable mounting? Was the Pro-matic for the GM or the powerglide set-up? Do you think the adapter plate you designed would work with other types of aftermarket shifters like B&M? I was thinking of trying the B&M Megashifter or the Hurst V-matic 2.
Any other details?

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Happiness isn't around the corner...
Happiness IS the corner.

Oreif,

I really don't know if it would work on others or not. I'm sure (now) that it could be MADE to work.

The Fiero has (at least) two different auto cables. One is a fixed cable with no adjustment and the other is an adjustable one. The cable, shift arm, and cable mounting bracket are all unique to the two cables. I first did the layout work for the fixed cable but that was pretty tricky to do and the adjustable one made it much better.

The shifter itself mounted on a piece of 1/4" aluminum plate that I had laying around. 3" would have been better since 2.5" only allowed 3 of the 4 mounting bolts to be used to mount it to the floor. 3 is more than enough, though, so that's not really a problem. You'll need to cut the end that retains the cable off of the old shifter and weld it on the back of the new shifter to use the original cable. The cable that comes with the new shifter is way too short to work, but you could probably order a longer one and use aftermarket. As far as I can see, I don't know of an aftermarket source for the automatic cables in the Fiero. I didn't check if they were still available from Pontiac, but the Fiero Store doesn't list them and they aren't available from the parts houses.

The bracket I made is also from 1/4" plate and we pretty much just rough band sawed it out and cleaned it up with files and die grinder. The cable mounting bracket needs to move more towards the front of the car and up. You'll bolt the cable on with the nut DOWN now, instead of up. The angle is also changed on the mounting bracket by cutting and welding. No mods were required to the shift arm. You might see a little grinding on that one in the picture, that was when we were using the first bracket and it didn't move it forward enough at that point.

The position of the retaining bracket is pretty critical. Not just the distance, but the angle it sits from the shift arm. If you think about it (and I know you will), you can see why. On the Hurst shifter, the ratchet action moves the cable almost exactly 3/10" on each ratchet stroke, but a different amount when moving it from P-R and R-N. The arcs have to be right or you won't hit your detents in the shifter and the arm at the same time.

The best location to put the shifter side retaining bracket is where it is on the picture. I ran scenarios with it everywhere from an inch above the handle down to way below the base of the shifter and by locating it there and using the adjustable cable, I managed to get the computer to hit the detents in the shifter and transmission to within about .070" of the cable stroke. There's enough slop in the cable to make up that much difference.

If you get a shifter and want to try it, let me know and I'll try to email you a more step by step instruction on how I went about it, particularly how I worked out the detents.

John Stricker

quote Originally posted by Oreif: Looks good! I have been thinking of changing the shifter to an aftermarket version as well. So from what I understand, The shifter itself mounts normally, But you need to make the mods at the trans for the cable mounting? Was the Pro-matic for the GM or the powerglide set-up? Do you think the adapter plate you designed would work with other types of aftermarket shifters like B&M? I was thinking of trying the B&M Megashifter or the Hurst V-matic 2. Any other details?

Thanks John,

I'll let you know when I decide on which shifter I'm going to go with and we can go from there.