Shifting, Part 1. K-Tuned brackets and your chassis

When it comes to shifting, you have a couple options: (1) keep the Honda shift box, or (2) get an aftermarket one.  I think Honda engineers are decent people, so I don't want to hurt their feelings by getting rid of the shift box they designed.  Given this, you can either get a K-Tuned or Karcepts shift adapter.  It seemed to me that the K-Tuned and Karcepts are functionally identical, but the K-Tuned website is very professional-looking and the kit looked like it included some quality hardware, so I chose that.

Open the box, and things are packaged nicely, so you get a warm-fuzzy about your purchase.  The instructions tell you how to go about fitting your brackets, so you start there.  So far so good.

So you go to fit the rear bracket in the chassis, and what the crap, the fitment is horrid.

That's how much freaking gap there is.

The gap has two root causes.  First, the mating surface is not flat (poor forming process order), and second, the bracket is too wide for the tunnel (design and forming problem)

Chuck it in a vice and prepare to modify the brackets you spent, what, like a hundred and fifty bucks on?

First step, flatten out the mating area.  I used a Makita electric die grinder with a sanding wheel and it works just fine on the soft aluminum.

The first side will look like this:

The second step is to narrow the edges so it fits in the tunnel.  This was actually a very iterative process, but about 45 minutes later I got it to fit.  When it's all said and done, the rear bracket will look like this:

After the rear bracket drama, if you think the main bracket is just going to fit, you're out of your mind.

Going ahead and test-fitting the main bracket, I couldn't even push the bracket up to meet the front of the tunnel (read the instructions, you'll know what I mean).

This is kind of what it looks like:

I found a neat trick where you put the shop light above the tunnel (in the original shifter hole) and you can see where gaps are and where you need to add clearance.

When you're done, you should have small gaps all around the bracket, so you can guarantee that the bolt loads are taken up only by the mating surfaces, and not the edges.

The remaining four pictures show where I had to clearance the bracket.  It's not a hard process, but it's time consuming due to the iterative nature of it.

Now, you can continue the shifter install process.