Shift. Shift shift shift.

I hate drilling holes.  Absolutely hate it.  Especially when it involves hand drills.  If I never had to drill another hole in my life, I could die happy.  Here's reason 1,847.  If you remember a while back, I bought an aftermarket shifter for the Viper.  I finally had time to install it.  Step one after removing the console is to drill out the rivets holding the inner shift boot in.  Chrysler, much to my chagrin, used steel rivets.  In the process of drilling them out, the bit slipped, hit the rubber boot, and this happened:

That was how the project started.  Fortunately, being rubber, it super glues back together very well.  The white haze you see around the seam is from the kicker I used to make the glue set up faster.  It looks terrible, but it works and fortunately you can't see it with the car assembled.

With the boot out of the way, we have access to the shifter.  Here's the hole we have to work with:

The instructions say to locate and drill some holes in the console for bolt access.  I didn't want to drill any holes in my perfectly good car.  It turns out that you can get to all the bolts for removal and installation without drilling holes or lowering the trans, but it takes a stubby wrench, a 1/4" drive u-joint with socket, and nimble fingers.  Since I had to put a trans mount in anyway, I just lowered the trans.  It makes things MUCH easier.  Here's the new Ipsco STS shifter next to the original.  It's MUCH higher quality:

Like I said, I wanted to swap the trans mount to the new Woodhouse urethane mount while I was at it.   Here's the new mount next to the old:

Once the belly pan is off, it's a pretty simple swap.  Just jack up the trans, undo some bolts, and swap the mount.  Since the shifter was the primary job, with the trans mount removed, I lowered the trans to give myself more room to work, then installed the new mount:

Here's our new shifter installed and ready for a test drive:

The car shifts MUCH cleaner with the new shifter.  It's nearly impossible to do the accidental 3-2 instead of 3-4 shift.  Downshifting is greatly improved too.  The throw is shorter than stock even with the tall stock shift knob.  It is a bit stiffer than stock, but the more precise shifts are worth it.  Between the Woodhouse mounts and STS shifter, the car shifts better than ever.  It's a pretty straight forward install, and the provided instructions are very well written.  Honestly, the hardest part was drilling out the shift boot rivets and if you don't have a hate-hate relationship with drill bits like I do, it's not a big deal.