As soon as I bought my Z24 I noticed that the shifter was not that great. The accordion boot was ugly, the shift knob felt like an oversized golf club head, and most importantly, the mechanism itself was sloppy. You could move the shifter in any direction a good bit without moving the transmission internals. Yuk! I started looking around, and although you can buy an aftermarket shifter, knob, boot, and upgraded bushings for imports and rear-wheel drive cars (both Hurst and B&M make shifters for my truck, for instance) there is nothing available for GM front-wheel drive cars, except Saturn. If my SC2 had been a 5-speed I could have bought a complete aftermarket shifter mechanism for it, but not for my Cavalier. This is hard to believe, considering that as far as I can tell, all Getrag 282-equipped GM cars use the same shifter mechanism with variations on the boot and shift knob.

I vowed to do something about it, but since there wasn't anything really wrong with it, I didn't put much effort into fixing it when I had other things to do. One fall '2000 morning, though, my Z24 decided that it had waited long enough. I got in my car to go run some errands one Saturday morning and went to put it in Reverse. Nothing. The shifter felt like it was stuck in a bowl of mashed potatoes. Raised the hood, and saw one of the shifter cables disconnected, waving at me. Upon inspection, the cable itself was fine. The cable attaches to the transmission through an endlink that has a bushing on one end, and bolts to the transmission on the other. The bushing is shouldered to retain the cable, and it had failed allowing the cable to slip off.

This is a picture of the cable end:

Got in my wife's car (thank goodness it decided to fail in the driveway!) and drove to my local GM dealer. Can't buy the bushing or the endlink -- gotta buy the whole cable. After calling around, nobody sells the bushing or the endlink. I took the failed bushing, endlink, and the other endlink/bushing assembly (two cables are used to shift, the other one was fine) to work. We have a machine shop at work, and I told my machinist friend of my problem.

He made two new bushings from oiled brass (shown here assembled on the endlinks):

These helped make the shifter move smoothly, but it is still sloppy. I removed the shifter mechanism itself in winter '01 in hopes of having him remove more of the slop, but things got busy and I needed my car back so I just put it back together.

There are a few areas that need to be addressed in this system to make it shift better. One area underhood is the gate select arm:

This assembly translates cable push/pull into motion that moves a sleeve on the transmission. It is bushed in nylon, and mine has a bit of slop. A bit might not seem like much, but if each piece in the system has a little slop, it adds up into a noticeable amount (called tolerance stackup). Rodney Dickman sells Fiero parts, and one of the things he sells is a kit to make this assembly work better. I don't yet know if it will fit this FWD Getrag.

Here is a picture of my modified gate select arm, and one of the two bushings that I installed. My machinist friend made these out of oiled brass. This change made a difference in the feel of the shifter's left-right motion. I'm pleased with the results.

Here is a picture of the shifter itself, as installed in the car. The shifter arm (what the user actually moves) has been removed in this picture. It pivots on the large stud just below the cable. The image quality is poor due to the shaky-handed user of the camera :) :

There are several places this shifter mechanism can be improved. The shifter arm itself has a slight amount of slop where it attaches to the base, but that would be difficult to remedy. The shifter arm hinge piece (piece that connects to the shifter arm) is attached to the base through a long bolt. This bolt is bushed in nylon. This method allows the shifter arm to be moved fore-and-aft (1->2, 3->4, 5->R) some without moving the cable. Brass bushings and brass shim washers would help here.

Here is the biggest problem in the shifter, the gate-select lever. When you move the shifter left-and-right (1-3-5) it moves a pin. A steel ball riding on this pin moves the gate-select lever which translates this left-right motion to fore-and-aft cable motion:

In this picture you can see the nylon-clad steel gate-select lever removed from the shifter, and the steel ball. Notice the wear in the gate-select lever where the steel ball rides. My car only has 76k miles on it.

This is where the majority of left-right slop in the shifter originates. I am not sure how to make this better. Time to talk to my mechanical-engineering buddies!

Here is the shifter arm itself, next to a tape measure:

The shifter arm is pretty long -- 4" from where the top of the boot starts (end of the weld) to the top. The long notch in the end is an alignment feature that prevents installing the shift knob incorrectly. Although not visible in this picture, there are two notches cut into the shifter 1 1/2" from the end. A U-shaped pin pushes through holes in the shift knob and ride in these notches to prevent the knob from coming off.

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