I got a batch of plating back so I had plenty of little jobs to address as I reinstalled all the parts back on the several cars that these parts belonged to!

One part was the shift lever that I talked about a few months back when I welded the reverse tab back onto the gated shifter plate. My plater knows not to chrome plate this ball socket because it needs to fit back in the socket of the shifter tower.

I’ve had owners mistakenly send out their shift lever out for plating and had the whole rod plated, only to find out the few thousandths of thickness the copper, nickel, and chrome from the plating made the ball too thick to go back into the socket!

My plater only put a layer of copper on the shift rod before masking off the ball so none of the other layers of plating would affect the dimensions of the shift lever. When a part gets stripped for plating, it can lose a little bit of the base metal as the acid strips the old plating off. Adding a layer of copper back on the piece helped return the old part back to the original size, but I had to remove a little bit of it for it to fit the socket perfectly. Using machinist blue helped me see where the socket was touching the ball, and sanding off a little bit of the soft copper was easy. Had this been plated with nickel or chrome, sanding and fitting would have been a lot harder if not nearly impossible. When it was done, lubricated, and installed, the shifter felt like butter!

Speaking of sockets, I recently had a hip replacement done to one of my hips! I’ve been suffering from arthritis in my hip(s) for a few years now, and my left hip got exponentially worse this year. My Orthopedist and I looked at the x-rays over the last 4 years and we could see the degeneration, and I decided the timing was never good, but a hip replacement was inevitable. I missed attending Monterey for the first time in decades, and even the FCA National Event in September, but I am glad to report 4 weeks post op, I am moving around better than I’ve been in years! I’m been able to get back to work and do 75% of the work I could do before, and the improvement can be felt on a daily basis. I’m already planning on attending the show in Newport Rhode Island next week without a hint of a limp! See you there!