Today’s a good day. Heck, any day new parts come in off the big brown truck is a good day. It wasn’t a week or two ago that we got our junkyard 727 Torqueflite back home and ready to heave up into the belly of our project ’69 Dodge Charger lovingly christened Killer Kong. We’ve been tinkering on our street-driven asphalt-pounding B-Body recently, but getting ‘Kong rolling under its own power has been our central focus.

What can we say, it’s been years since we last drove our Charger and we’re getting pretty friggin’ tired of pushing it in and out of the garage. While we’re working on a full-length technical how-to on building our Torqueflite, we wanted to drop a couple sneak shots of the other goodies that accompanied our TCI-equipped 727 3-speed reverse pattern, manually-shifted street fighter gearbox.

When it came to rowing through the gears with lightning speeds and laser-precision, we couldn’t think of a better stick than TCI‘s Outlaw Shifter. Made from billet aluminum with a very Mopar-appropriate pistol grip-style shifter, we giggled at the idea of maybe swapping out the black grip with a woodgrain replacement.

While the Outlaw can come with all sorts of bells and whistles like an electric shifter kit and one- and two-button equipped triggers, we opted for the simplest setup with a Park/Neutral safety switch (along with the provided provisions for a reverse light).

While we don’t have any delusions of grandeur to race ‘Kong competitively, it’s nice to have the right stuff to meet NHRA/IHRA regulations with a reverse lock out.

In addition to our super sharp shifter, we had more needful components come in off the delivery truck like our Super Street Fighter torque converter. Designed for the street racer, this torque converter is a great fit for our hot Charger.

Geared for street machines with a performance camshaft, big four-barrel (or even multi) carburetor and higher compression ratios, TCI’s converter is meant to take advantage of all the horsepower found at higher rpms.

Made with furnace-brazed fins, needle bearings, and a hardened, pre-ground hub, our Super Street Fighter is the right pick for our big block set up. And since we’re running 4.56’s, that made our 3,800-to-4,000rpm stall the right choice. And like all RB-Block (big block) Mopars, the flywheel ring is incorporated into the converter, requiring us to only pickup a flexplate to mate it to the crank flange.

Totaling out our Christmas-In-April, we scored one of TCI’s Performance Transmission Cooler kits. Designed with racing in mind while providing the benefits of superior transmission cooling for street use as well, each of TCI’s coolers are constructed from aluminum and powder coated black with #6 AN fittings to work with either steel braided or high pressure lines.

Look forward to the Torqueflite rebuild feature coming in the next week or two and the installation shortly thereafter. We still are working out the logistics for a big stroke HEMI, so we’re cooking up a way cool “interim” motor to help get ‘Kong back on its own two feet (well, four wheels) and let us shake all the bugs out, so stay tuned!