We ended up using the original auto trans shifter with our AOD. I know that may sound unusual, or even totally impossible. But, it was almost too easy to do. Thebehavior of the tranny and the shoft positions is different in some ways, and I discovered what has been called, by others, the AOD Shuffle when dealing with manually shifting into 1st and 2nd gear from the oem shifter. I cover that in the attached PDF document. And I also speak about it and dxdemonstrate it in a YouTube video I did.
Here is the AOD shift rod unit I used with our 73 Mach 1, in the embedded photo below.
View attachment 82758
Lots of adjustments can be made, to include length and radius lengths. I was able to keep my original shifter, although the behavior for how the oem shifter works with the AOD is a little different.
Here are two YouTube videos Lynda and I produced that may be helpful with your AOD project. In the descriptions you will find key portions of the videos covering certain key subjects, so you can go straight to the items of interest as opposed to watching the entire video you are looking at, although I personally feelthere is a lot of info in both videos.:
AOD Shift Rod from Lokar (purchased through Summit Racing, part # is in description text):
AOD shifting and oem shifter behavior:
Gil