1968 XR7-G Hertz Restoration by XR7-Gry

5 minute(s) of a 214 minute read

Now that the console had been restored it was time to pay some attention to the shifter handle. The one that was in my car when I bought it was worn and also the chrome had small pits. I sanded it down and painted it once, but I was not happy with the result and sanded it down again. Then I also became aware of that the Cougar emblem insert should have been gold, not silver like mine. I assume the original handle had been replaced with one from a 70 Eliminator so I did not want to spend more time on it, as it would never be correct for my car anyway. Then I just had to look at the WCCC parts catalog once again and I ended up buying one of their reproduction handles. 
http://www2.cougarpartscatalog.com/woodt.html 
Javier at WCCC warned me that the wood on the reproduction handle was a little lighter in color that the original, but I figured I could do something to change that. 

A couple of days ago I got my box with parts from the WCCC Black Friday sale, and I picked up the XR7-G handle and unfortunately I did not like what I saw.   The color was the least problem with this one. It looks like it is made of a different wood, maybe oak? It does not look like walnut to me. (I might be wrong on this one) What I found to be more of a problem was that it was poorly made, the holes in the wood had been drilled out of center so they did not align with the chrome and were mounted a little slanted, the shape of the wood is not correct and finally because the wood is not centered and drilled right the black plastic knob that goes in the handle does not move freely and get stuck in the inner position. The last can be fixed, but the rest is not fixable. On more thing that I noticed is that the chrome part on the reproduction handle has been grind and polished so hard that it is rounded where it should have sharp edges. I might be picky and this might sound worse than it is, it is still a nice handle for someone, but it is not something I would like to use on an original G.    

Many years ago I bought a NOS wood shifter handle at a swap meet that I planned to use on my 1967 Mercury S-55 convertible. Fortunately I ended up using the original chrome handle for that car and I had almost forgotten that I had the extra wood handle here. I pulled it out of my closet and inspected it. It was a perfect walnut wood handle and totally identical to the one that were original for my car except for that there was no Cougar emblem. So I decided to turn this handle into a G-handle. First step on my plan was to find a good way to remove the emblem from the new handle. I assumed it was glued in there, and usually glue gets softer with heat. So I heated up the reproduction handle and the emblem fell out by itself. This gave me mixed feelings, it scared me a little that it came out that easy, but on the other hand I was happy too   

Here is a picture showing the 3 different handles. The light wood color on the reproduction does not show as good on the picture as it does in real life



I decided to use a sharp hobby knife to carve out the wood hole for the emblem in the NOS handle. To do this I needed a sharp knife, a steady hand and lots of patience, but the result is pretty good. 



Finally I glued in the Cougar emblem(using a good quality glue) and there it was. In my opinion this is a much nicer handle that the reproduction. The only thing that makes me feel a little bad about the result is the price I ended up paying for that little gold cougar emblem.