Custom Shift Knobs

This is my long goodbye to cars as we knew them.

I think the modern luxuries of the digital age makes obsolete the most human expression in driving. I'm sentimental about driving. I know its bad, I'm sorry. Now with things so uprooted the lathe is my meditative place to think about the freedom to drive away from anything. Maybe that's one of the heartbreaks of being American, is the trope of getting in your car, Irish exiting your way into the next timezone and leaving all your troubles in a state that might take weeks to walk to. I used to be so good at it.

Over the past year I set out to develop my own shift knobs after discovering there weren’t many options for my car that could be used with a reverse lockout mechanism. I’ve landed on a hybrid practice of batching 3D printed inserts that are epoxied into lathe turned knobs. The process has been refined from a three day affair down to an hour long project, start to finish. After many, many failures, redesigns, and months of prototype testing, I feel confident now getting in the car for a long drive with one fresh off the lathe. This experiment is still subject to change with ongoing feedback.