How to Install Lokar Shift Knobs for a Factory Appearance

Lokar’s Muscle Car Shifter Knob is built to replicate the look and feel of a factory GM shifter closely enough to fool most people at a car show, and it won SEMA’s award for Best New Interior Accessory Product. The install is straightforward but order-dependent: the shifter has to be in Park, the set screw inside the knob has to stay untouched, and the adapter housing has to be held steady while tightening. Here’s exactly how to avoid the mistakes first-timers usually make.

While we all respect and love the original early hot rods of the â€˜40s and â€˜50s, the street rods built from the â€˜60s until this moment have written their own history and produced fine examples of traditional hot rods. As hot rodding progressed through the ages hot rodders were quick to find and adapt the latest, greatest and fastest parts onto their hot rods. It was not uncommon for â€˜60s hot rodders to pirate parts off of the popular muscle cars of the day. Grabbing a Muncie or Borg-Warner T-10 complete with shifter for their hot rods was common back in the day of the cast iron Powerglide. The parts were very common at the local wrecking yard. Beyond getting a good four-speed out of the deal the factory shifter was often used too, complete with the iconic T-handle. Today that look simply says â€œhot rodâ€.

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A shift knob seems like the last place a hot rod build could go wrong, right up until it’s the one detail that gives away a modern conversion at a glance. Get the throw, the finish, or the engagement feel even slightly off, and a dashboard full of otherwise perfect period-correct work suddenly looks like exactly what it is — a new aftermarket shifter bolted where a factory unit used to live. Lokar built its reputation on closing that gap, engineering hardware that mimics the look and feel of a factory GM muscle car shifter closely enough to fool most people at a car show. The company’s Muscle Car Shifter Knob adapter was popular enough with builders to win SEMA’s award for Best New Interior Accessory Product — but the installation itself has a couple of steps that are easy to get backwards if you’re doing it for the first time.

Getting the Install Right the First Time

The actual installation is simpler than the stakes might suggest, but the order of operations matters. Before touching anything, the shifter lever needs to be all the way forward in the Park position — starting from anywhere else throws off the alignment of every step that follows. From there, the jam nut just below the shifter knob gets loosened, but the set screw inside the knob itself should be left alone entirely; that screw’s job is to lock the knob to the shifter rod once everything else is dialed in, and loosening it prematurely is one of the more common mistakes first-time installers make. The last step is the one that trips people up the most: when tightening the new knob down, the muscle car adapter housing has to be held stationary by hand, or the housing will spin along with the knob and end up cross-threaded.

Why the Details Matter to Judges and Buyers

Lokar offers the Muscle Car Shifter Knob in black acrylic, white acrylic, and a tumble-polished “Brite” finish, and every unit is manufactured and assembled in the USA. The engagement feel is deliberately tuned to replicate a factory GM muscle car shifter, which is exactly the kind of small, tactile detail that separates a build that reads as authentic from one that just looks the part in photos. It’s also why the accessory won SEMA’s award for Best New Interior Accessory Product — judges at that level are looking at precisely the sort of detail that can make or break a hot rod’s factory-correct illusion, the same illusion this whole shifter swap is built around.

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