Well Youngster,depends on what 'oldschool' you want to go to! Ha! Yup, Lokar has some good ones, Remember the old cheesey typa shifters that hurst made back in the 60's and 70's...The Indy shifters, they looked pretty oldschool. B&M had some....don't know if they still do....
WAAAYYY back in the day, I remember we'd hook up a manual shifter by routing the 1-2, and 3-4 rods onto 2 bellcranks side by side, and there was a peg that tripped the 2nd bellcrank, so when you rowed the shifter like a old hurst 4 speed, 1 gear was Park, 2nd was 1st, 3rd was 2nd, 4th was 3rd, Neutral and reverse was on a seperated lever that was put on the same pivot pin (extended, of course). Usually though you were the only one that drove the car because they were so finicky...
The favorite was get the same shifter, take it completely apart, extend the pivot pin 1 inch, weld the rod holder oto the botton of the crome shift handle, shortened of course. On the right side of the shift lever, for everygear, you hade a plate with notches where shifter would slide back into the next gear, you had to pry the shift lever over about 1/8 of a inch, going from Drive to park was easy, just shove the lever forward and it would just slap across those 1/8 detents. Between the 'detent plate' and the chrome shift lever arm, we'd cut down piece of small valvespring and put about 2 coils in there (those out of a small 5 horse Briggs worked great!) and on the other side of the shifter, there was another piece of vaalvespring, then a washer and a rollpin going thru the pivot pin. It was crude, a really frankenstienish version of a ratchet shifter.
You had to push the lever over to clear the next notch so to slide into that gear. Slapped on a big gob of wheel bearing grease to keep it operating correctly, and a big rubber boot to keep the grease off ourselves.....
Yup, we made em.....there were plenty of missed gears, going the wrong way thru the gears.....it was fun...and often costly....blown transmissions abounded....
