The Ford Barn

datac · 05-15-2022, 02:47 PM

I bought a neglected old '58 Ford nine-passenger Country Sedan field car that's turned out to be something very different than I had anticipated- turns out that it was a project someone had put a bunch of work into before it was parked back in the '90s.

Anyway- among a number of decent mods the PO had done was swapping in a 3.03 3-sp toploader, set up properly through the factory shifter. The speedo cable cooked itself against the exhaust in an hour or two of running, so it likely didn't have many miles between installation and my getting it roadworthy. Order a new speedo cable, which naturally doesn't fit. On the tranny end, I find this drive gear setup that looks to my untrained eye like something out of a TH350, with a 7/8" threaded attachment for the speedo cable. I know some Ford trucks used a threaded speedo cable for toploaders, but I thought those were 5/8" setups. What exactly am I looking at, and would I be better served trying to swap this for the Ford equivalent or is there a GM cable that would make my problems go away?

05-15-2022, 02:47 PM	#1
datac Member Join Date: Apr 2019 Location: Pacific NW Posts: 30	Toploader speedo cable mystery I bought a neglected old '58 Ford nine-passenger Country Sedan field car that's turned out to be something very different than I had anticipated- turns out that it was a project someone had put a bunch of work into before it was parked back in the '90s. Anyway- among a number of decent mods the PO had done was swapping in a 3.03 3-sp toploader, set up properly through the factory shifter. The speedo cable cooked itself against the exhaust in an hour or two of running, so it likely didn't have many miles between installation and my getting it roadworthy. Order a new speedo cable, which naturally doesn't fit. On the tranny end, I find this drive gear setup that looks to my untrained eye like something out of a TH350, with a 7/8" threaded attachment for the speedo cable. I know some Ford trucks used a threaded speedo cable for toploaders, but I thought those were 5/8" setups. What exactly am I looking at, and would I be better served trying to swap this for the Ford equivalent or is there a GM cable that would make my problems go away?