In 1987, the C36 came with small plastic shift and throttle levers. Over time they get brittle and break. They also are hard to use because they are pretty short. One of the first projects was to upgrade those to the more modern style metal levers.
The new handles are available from Catalina Direct:
Getting the old ones off should have just been a matter of unbolting them, but of course nothing is easy when working on an older boat. In this case, the bolts were seized and I had to cut the levers off, then use PB Blaster to get the old bolts out. What should have been a 10 minute job turned into two hours and a lot of frustration.
Luckily, installing the new levers was pretty easy. They bolted on as expected.
Woot, ready to go😀… Alas, no. 😒
Since the new levers are longer, they now hit the helm guard, and I could not get the transmission into forward gear. To fix this, I relocated the cable mount on the back of the transmission to move the center point of the lever. Now it goes into forward and reverse.
Shifting is now much easier with the extra leverage, and they look a lot nicer as well.
