The Doctor’s office.

This stuff is beginning to look complicated!

Mike at Hurst Shifters has been repairing them for three years and he says that he’s never found a customer’s shifter that he couldn’t handle. The shifters come into his office in all sorts of conditions: modified, broken, bent, drilled, welded, worn and dirty from years of positive shifting and road grime. With the backlog of printed material that exists in notebooks of exploded plan views from the original Hurst Company, Mike’s job isn’t easy, just made easier because of great documentation.

On occasion Hurst Shifters needs to manufacture replacements for missing or broken parts since there is no stockpile of duplicates ready to install off the shelf. But for some of the more popular OEM shifters that were assemblyline installed in the ’60s and ’70s, the company will invest in tooling and production to create a replacement for problematic broad market parts. For an occasional one-off specialty shifter, however, there may be no way that the Doc can help you.

Some damage comes from traffic accidents, some comes from using the wrong tools to disassemble a shifter, but seldom does the Doc pronounce a shifter terminal. The initial diagnosis of my Hurst Shifter was that someone had drilled out the shift lever holes rather than utilizing original locator pins, preventing the use of the correct retainers.

The Doc’s patient load is as high as one hundred Hurst Shifters per month and is usually at capacity as the racing season winds down, but about fifty units is generally his summer workload. All shifters are treated equally with the incoming paperwork as he identifies the shifter itself and then through breakdown to diagnose the issues. He adds a numbered tag that’ll match all paperwork and assure you the return of your personal muscle car property.

Your shifter is hot solvent cleaned, sandblasted and given a detailed hand inspection and at that time Doc decides if something needs to be sent to the welding or machine shop. If something needs extra care due to wear and tear, there is no additional cost to the customer, but if there is real damage to your shifter, that’ll cost you.

After the disassembly every part is marked with Hurst’s internal work order number to be absolutely sure that your period-correct parts are returned to your shifter exactly as they came in. Some of the shifters they work on are for Concours restorations where the builder is going to show off their vehicle and everything has to match perfectly, so attention to detail is one of the Doc’s specialties.

It’s all taken apart…