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As you all know, the standard 85 MPH speedometer in these cars is a joke. The 140 MPH Motorsports unit is great, but on the rare occasion that you find one the guy wants a mint for it.
We Canadians fare much better - we get a 200 km/hr (120 MPH) speedo from the factory. This speedo will bolt right into your US cars, but the odometer will measure out kilometers instead of miles. This means that for every mile you put on the car the odometer registers 1.6 - in other words, you end up showing many more miles than what you've actually got on the car.
I recently installed a TC cluster into my '88 5.0 'Bird, and I did the tach mod to make it accurate for a V8. It got me thinking, though, that perhaps the speedometer could be modified as well, so that the odometer showed miles instead of kilometers. Today I took apart a Canadian and an American analogue speedomoeter to see what the differences were. I found that as far as the odometer is concerned the differences are purely mechanical - the gearing is different between the two, but the electronics are identical. This means that, as I had originally suspected, you can install a Canadian 120-MPH speedometer into your car with the US odomoeter attached to it. There are only three screws holding the odometer assembly to the speedo head, so the swap is quite straightforward. Now you can have your 120 MPH speedo with US odometer for a fraction of what a Motorsports speedo would cost!
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Sam's Fox ThunderCats ... Your home on the web for fox Thunderbirds and Cougars
We Canadians fare much better - we get a 200 km/hr (120 MPH) speedo from the factory. This speedo will bolt right into your US cars, but the odometer will measure out kilometers instead of miles. This means that for every mile you put on the car the odometer registers 1.6 - in other words, you end up showing many more miles than what you've actually got on the car.
I recently installed a TC cluster into my '88 5.0 'Bird, and I did the tach mod to make it accurate for a V8. It got me thinking, though, that perhaps the speedometer could be modified as well, so that the odometer showed miles instead of kilometers. Today I took apart a Canadian and an American analogue speedomoeter to see what the differences were. I found that as far as the odometer is concerned the differences are purely mechanical - the gearing is different between the two, but the electronics are identical. This means that, as I had originally suspected, you can install a Canadian 120-MPH speedometer into your car with the US odomoeter attached to it. There are only three screws holding the odometer assembly to the speedo head, so the swap is quite straightforward. Now you can have your 120 MPH speedo with US odometer for a fraction of what a Motorsports speedo would cost!
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Sam's Fox ThunderCats ... Your home on the web for fox Thunderbirds and Cougars
Sam's Fox ThunderCats ... Your home on the web for fox Thunderbirds and Cougars