Straight Is The Gate

To the untrained eye, this may look like an ordinary, straight-gated automatic transmission shift lever.

But it's not the one that the Eagle came (to me) with. At least not entirely. The metal lever and the handle came from an assembly that arrived from Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

See, when I got the car, there was this liiiiiitle tiny huge problem with the shifter. Basically, imagine you're in your car, about to move the gear lever. You probably need to push the button in with your thumb to unhook the thing so you can move it, right? That's so it doesn't move around by accident. Well, when I got the car, this mechanism was probably long since broken, so the lever just kind of clicked back and forth through the gears (or more accurately, the detents) by just gently pushing the lever forward or back.

This means that it if got kicked or bumped somehow, it could easily move, say, into Reverse while the car was driving down the road. You don't need to be a mechanic to surmise that if that happened, it would be a Bad Thing. Not to mention that it could nullify all the work you just did to rebuild the transmission.

So in what will be one of the Eagle's last significant repairs under my watch,* I Frankensteined the lever and handle from the new shifter assembly into the one that was already in the car.
The end result is what you see above. The gear lever now works properly, and there were plenty of leftovers:

*As I described in a post on Oppo, I may be sending the Eagle off into the sunset soon. Let us observe a moment of silence.