speedometer Cable

[Fordguy85]

I want to get rid of the speedometer cable, any one know of any good products that will get rid of the old mechanical cable and bring me into this century ? hopefully something that will work with the stock cluster

[Fordguy85]

i have a 72 F250, I have gone through 2 speedo cables in the past 6 months, Not really sure why, first one was chewed up when I got it and was seized, which destroyed the speedo gears, I replaced both the drive and driven gears and put a new speedo cable in, about 2 months ago. Now a week ago my speedometer stops working again, not really sure what to do with the problem, other than get rid of the mechanical style speedo : /

[68RGR]

Well, I suppose you could attach a magnet to the drive shaft and mount a sensor (reed switch, hall effect or similar) and convert the pulses to drive a digital readout. Someone probably makes such a setup if you really want to go that route.

I kinda like the sweeping speedo - As long as it keeps working reasonably well.

If you can get by with a high gear only speedo, you could modify the scale on a tach to give you a direct speed reading. Or, if you really want to get crazy, put a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc gear scale on the tach!

[Fordguy85]

my whole issue is having an actual cable running from the speedo to the trans, Its keeps binding up on me, Ive lubed them, and made sure they were as straight as can be and they still bind up on me.....

[fastEdsel]

Our experience has been too much lubrication which gets old and sticky. We dry the cables entirely and clean the cases as much as possible in varsol. Then with a generous amount of either brake clean or starting ether we clean the inside cable dry then coat it with flake graphite and we get good life from them. If the cables are old and need regeneration it may take a couple treatments and the speedometers can get a little bouncy but they usually work their way out of it. Also check the bends your cable makes on it's way to your speedometer, it should be a nice gentle sweep through the firewall, no kinks. We have used driveshaft magnets for driveshaft rotation counters for our air spray trucks on the road to aim at with the spray planes from back in the days before GPS but just show rotation counts and not speed. 27 rotations equals 70 feet, the spray swath of our airplanes. Just aim at the truck, when the airplane gets about half way across the field, the truck operator moves ahead another 27 rotations. It's actually very accurate. Also if the flagger goes much over 70 MPH the magnet will fly off depending of course on the rear axle gear ratio. Some farm equipment uses a radar device to show ground speed but don't really know if that would work at highway speeds.