Hi all!
I haven't posted in years. But, you can be certain when I post something, that its usually quite useful.
Many of you may not know, but
Blue_71 recently converted his factory
71 2WD long bed from a stock 3-speed transmission to a new, modern-day, 1991 Chevy 5-speed transmission (more specifically, a GetRag NV3500 tranny).
He did this to try an get better gas mileage out of a tranny with an over-drive gear. It worked. He had to swap out a cross member on the frame to do this. (That took a few hours of busting out the factory rivets.) But it was well worth the swap! His gas mileage has SKYROCKETED!
The only problem he was having was with the speedometer, which is a manual screw-in cable (from the factory). To convert the electric signal from the modern-day tranny, he used a
Cable-X converter box from
Abbott Enterprises. They are really expensive to buy, but he found one used on ebay for a really reasonable price.
Even tho he bought the box, it came with no manuals, no info, nothin! We could barely find anything online to explain how to set the thing up. The only info we found was on an
RX-7 forum (go figure!). However, this company is awesome. We sent them an email, and their tech support responded in
less than 2.5 hours! WOW! WOW! WOW! I'm shocked!
Anyways, if you want to change your tranny, (or if you already have), but you want to maintain that look of original factory/manual guages (including the speedometer), you should look at getting one of these boxes. It works great! And all the info for setting one up can be found here (on the
RX-7 forum). I just wanted to post it here as well, because it seems pretty relevant.
Geesh - I sound like I work for this company or somethin.... but they just had awesome, geeky, fast,
American tech-support - a rare thing these days!
Maybe Blue_71 can post some more about his swap/conversion to the new tranny, along with the pics of the converter box. I enjoyed helping him with the fix this evening!
Thanks a heap for readin' this long post!
~jewels.