Page Forty-Eight - What a Knob

 

A focal point of floor shift cars is the gear shift knob.  And like most junk junkies, I love easter egg hunting in consoles, glove boxes, boots, the mysterious abyss under seats, moldy boxes, and other dark nooks and crannies in old cars.  I found a collection of Alpine shift knobs in Alphie and the Organ Donor.

The original knob is a black Bakelite affair, slightly green and grungy with age.  It has the shift pattern, a good thing, but it’s as boring as golf on the radio.  Not my first choice, but I gave it a good cleaning and shine, and I must say, it came back much better than I thought it would.

The original Bakelite knob
I forgot to take a before pic, sorry

Screw a stud into the knob - this one is off the head
("Screw a stud into the knob," it's too easy.)

Chuck it up in the drill press (pillar drill) to easily polish your knob
"That's what she said", again, my apologies, I'm still 13 years old

I will probably throw it on for judged shows because stock sometimes grabs an odd point (although with a walnut dash, very UN-stock, it probably won’t matter.)

I found two aftermarket knobs in the bottom of a console or buried in a glove box; both are wood with foil Rootes emblems under murky plastic lenses.  When they were new, they were probably quite spiffy, but time and neglect haven’t treated them well.  But they gave me an idea.

Assorted shift knobs unearthed during Alphie's tear down
(Except the one on the left, which Mike made) 

The foil Rootes emblems were tattered and crumpled, but I bought a Rootes logo lapel pin when I ordered the replacement keys from Triple C Motor Accessories.  The lapel pin is smaller than the foil inserts, so I couldn’t just replace the foil with the pin.  But my neighbor Mike is an accomplished wood turner, really his stuff is amazing, so…

With one of the wood knobs with the shape I wanted and the lapel pin in hand, I moseyed to Mike’s house and asked him if he could turn a knob similar in shape, but with a hole in the top the diameter of the lapel pin.

For Mike, this was a 15-minute job.  The only catch was that he had to order a 5/16” X 24 insert (fine thread, of bloody course) to match the gear lever.  After a quick turn on the lathe, Mike forstner bitted a hole in the top of the knob exactly the diameter of the lapel pin.  And Bob’s Your Uncle, it is as perfect as I knew it would be.

Chunk-o-Walnut chucked up in Mike's lathe

Rounded out

Mike matched the shape of one of my "found" knobs
He oiled the walnut, hence the color change

PERFECTION!

Since I don’t have a chintzy clear plastic lens to cover it, I planned on a two-part resin that I see folks using to make all manner of craft projects to do the trick.  The stuff’s expensive, about 30 bucks for two 4-ounce (118 ml, for the metrics among us) bottles!

With the lapel in place, before adding the resin
I wish the resin had turned out this clear

Mistake: I wanted to reproduce the convex shape of the chintzy plastic lens, so the resin would need to be higher than the top of the knob.  The resin would settle into a flat plane at the tip of the hole.  I had a paper circular gasket from something somewhere that I taped surrounding the hole so that the resin would settle higher than the surface of the wood.  Solid plan, but the resin is the best glue ever, and I had to sand through the gasket since it wouldn’t just pop off like I had planned.

I found a threaded rod with 5/16” X 24 threads (I think it is one like the studs that hold the thermostat housing on the cylinder head) and chucked it up in the drill press (aka the pillar drill for the Brits).

With it spinning merrily along, I could sand the resin down to shape, and with continually finer sandpaper, I smoothed it out and the resin slowly cleared.  Wet sanding with 3000-grit smoothed out the resin, but it was still a bit cloudy.

Mothers Mag & Aluminum Polish parted the clouds in the resin and gave everything a pleasing shine.  Now you can see the tiny bubbles that didn’t float out during curing, alas.  (I need a vacuum pot to get all the bubbles out, note for the future.)

This close-up shows the tiny bubbles in the resin
The spots on the walnut is the woodgrain

Some wipe-on polyurethane and some paste wax, and Alphie has a custom shift knob, and what a knob it is!