Hey all,

I have a 71 F250 with a 390 FE, and i am trying to fix the speedometer. Problem is, the cable coming from the speedometer is loose and i have no idea how or where to reinstall it back into the transmission . Any help would be much appreciated. We have a lot of streets where the speed limits are changing every few blocks or so...so it would be nice to know how fast i'm going. Any ideas on how to fix her up would be much appreciated!

 

Welcome to FTE

Inside the speedometer cable's housing is a woven steel core. These were lubed at the factory, but after so many years, the lube dried up, the core would then bind up inside the housing and snap.

Every autoparts store sells a universal core replacement, just cut it to fit, install in the housing, lube with graphite, or a thin coating of white lithium grease.

A dry speedo core can also cause the speedo needle to jump around.

 

There should be a hole the cable end plugs into near the driveshaft end of the transmission, on the left-hand side. If this isn't there, someone may have installed a transmission out of a 4x4, the ones with a divorced transfer case used the short 2wd tailhousing, but the speedo drive spot wasn't opened up in the casting. Their speedo drive came from the transfer case.

 

Thanks for all of your help, got it taken care of! Now it's time to tackle one of the other 500 small projects that she needs work on