Well this past Saturday I was at a road course event. We ran about ten minute lapping sessions and on the last session of the day (number six) coming out of the high-speed sweeper the shifter jumped out of my hand and a loud grinding noise came from beneath the car. If anything was going to break on that day, I thought it would be an axle, not the shift assembly.
Anyways what happened was the poly bushing on the tranny melted from all the lapping and allowed the shift extension to fall off. It then hit the ground and bent itself into an interesting shape. I spent about a good hour taking it off and bending it back into shape but managed to drive home from the track.

Now to the point of this post. The way the extension was mounted was that a poly bushing (aftermarket even) was pushed into the shift extension and then the bushing was mounted to the tranny and secured by a bolt & washer. Well if you're running around a track for ten minutes things are going to heat the hell up so like I said above, the bushing got soft and there was nothing to stop the extension from slipping off. This bothered me quite a bit. I grabbed a block of T-6061 and machined myself a backing plate so that this would never happen again (I'll post pics later). I then jumped online to order myself a new shift extension and was pretty damned surprised to see that the Integras (have a swap in my civic) come stock with a backing plate!! Now I'm 99% sure that my car never had any such part but to be certain I browsed on over to a civic diagram ( Click Me) and what do I see? A damned option. Some models have the backing plate (#31) while others do not. So, I suggest that anyone on here with a solid shift-linkage tranny go check out your config and if you don't have this plate, damn well buy it. BUY IT! After spending two hours machining my own plate I wish I would have seen that link first. Oh well, at least I've got some bling now.

 

The melted poly bushing.

 

Result of two hours of machining when two minutes of online ordering could have done the same thing...

 

Another shot of the blingin' waste of time.

 

damn thats some weird shit

 

Here's a pic of everthing assembled. Notice the mangled shift extension. Those things sure don't like being dragged along the ground.

Anyways, I doubt it will EVER fall off again.

 

I wonder what the melting point temp. is for a polyurathane.

The one you machined looks pretty heavy duty, nice work.

 

damn, hook me up with one a dem bling's!

 

Any time you want to waste time fabricating cool stuff like that on my car, I am more than game.