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Bought a 91 F150, 302, auto w/od. Guy I bought it from was trying to replace water pump and broke stud off in block. So with his misfortune, he got frustrated and sold me the truck for $500. Lucky me. I got the broken stud out and replaced the water pump. Truck runs fine.
One problem, the tach reads 3500 rpms as soon as you crank it up. When you hit the pedal it crawls up to 4000 and when you let off, goes right back to 3500. He did say he had a used transmission put it in and I notice it shifts out very quickly (low rpms) and shifts pretty hard. Would a bad tach sensor be causing both of these problems? If so, where is the tach sensor located, how hard is it to replace and how much does it cost?
What trans do you have? If it is an E4OD then the tach would cause bad shifting.
I an a complete dummy on electrics so hopefully someone will help soon.
You'll probably need to replace the instrument cluster, but the first thing you should try is the VSS sensor, it will be located on top of the rear differential. Clean the terminals for both the E4OD tranny and the sensor and see if the problem goes away. if it doesn't, replace the sensor. Does the needle in the speedo jump erratically? if it does you could have a broken exitor ring (but by your symptoms i think this isn't the issue right now). Anyway, try the sensor before, if that doesn't work, check the connections to your cluster, else you'll have to replace the PSOM.
Don't run your truck for long without addressing this issue, it will hurt your expensive tranny.
The tachometer gets it's signal off the negative side of the coil. There is no direct correlation between the tach or transmission. The PCM does use the engine RPM and VSS, as well as a few other signals, to determine when and how "hard" to shift.