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Thread: Cheetah Shifter Mod for the A413

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    Hybrid booster Turbo Mopar Contributor powermaxx's Avatar
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    Smile Cheetah Shifter Mod for the A413

    I've had a few requests on how I did this for my GLHS. So here it is for you TM er's.


    Following is how I modified the Cheetah shifter for a RWD to work on my 87 GLHS Charger. Since it was a numbered car there was no cutting involved during this installation. I wanted to sort it out for a future project and the GLHS was handy.
    The Cheetah Shifter can be setup to have either a forward or reverse cable entry. Which allowed me to route the cable rearward and back under the passenger seat and then down and out the hole where the manual shifter was mounted over. Think of it as a big "U Turn". The cable needs to “Push” the tranny shift arm into Park so the cable needs to exit the shifter from the rear to match the A413 cable travel direction. I could also still use the E-brake by making a “Pedestal” to mount the shifter up high and towards the driver side. This was just right for my racing positon. Any of the Cheetah shifters can be made into a MOPAR shifter. You can take them apart to do so, and then add the gate of choice for regular or reverse pattern shift gate. I used the MOPAR reverse pattern gate as a starting point for my modifications.

    Anyway on to the details.

    The first thing was to determine the “Throw” of the stock tranny shift arm and compare that to the Cheetah shifter cable throw. You’ll find the tranny arm is way to short. Position both to thier neutral positions and line the cable end up with the tranny arm (don’t pin them just yet as you want to see where everything wants to line up without forcing anything. Then go to “Park” and then “Low” (or 3rd in my situation) on the tranny arm and the Cheetah shifter arm. Look to see where the cable end position is relative the tranny arm. The stock throw is way to short so you’ll need to lengthen it. I added a small bracket to the OEM arm and clamped it place (vise grips) and checked the throw again. I added about 7/8” from the OEM pivot hole and welded it in place. So now I have enough “throw” on the tranny side of things. (It’s ugly but strong…)



    The OEM bracket that mounts the cable to the trans now causes the cable to be in a bind so I made a new wider bracket that allowed me to mount the cable in the OEM fashion and move the cable clamp out about the same 7/8” so everything was lined up again. It also allowed me to utilize the groove in the cable housing for a “U” bolt to fasten the cable to the bracket.



    So that took care of the tranny side of things now into the “Office”.

    While lining up the tranny arm and shifter arm in the neutral position I checked the tranny detents to the “Reverse Pattern” shift gate. I marked on the gate plate where the A413 wanted each one; Park, Reverse, Neutral and (in my case) 1st gear slots/stops all lined up! Cool, now I don’t have to make a brand new gate plate (eventually I will but for now…). So what about 2nd and 3rd (remember I have the RVMB so I need the reverse pattern plate). I found that both 2nd and 3rd fell a little short of the standard RWD gate openings. So I enlarged the second gear slot by about 1/8” so it could “Pop” over into the gate opening as before (shifter is spring loaded to pull over into the slot/detent).



    Make sure you grind a little of the leading corner off so it pops into the gate smoothly like before. You don’t want anything to hang up at the wrong time!


    Now nothing interferes with where the A413 wants to “Detent” for any of the gears. But you’re not quiet finished yet as 2nd and 3rd don’t have a “Hard Stop” to hit when you “bang” through those gears. So I made a small metal “L” and riveted it to the back of the gate plate to bring the stop surfaces up to match where the A413 wants to stop for 2nd and 3rd.




    Now everything lines up and stops in the right place to perfectly match the A413 shift pattern with the RWD Cheetah Shifter. Eventually I’ll machine up a nice new gate with the “gate pattern” that I made. But the “Pattern” was strong enough to allow me to test everything out. This shifter works smoothly and matches the A413 detents perfectly. This took an afternoon from start to finish.

    Here are a couple of shots showing the shifter mounted and also the tranny bracket mounted.




    Last edited by powermaxx; 01-12-2008 at 09:55 PM.

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