Hello

There is a very large class of people that own 65/66 Mustangs that, as far as I can tell, anyway, have been, for the most part, ignored entirely. They don't really want that 100 pt. show car that is so nice and was soooo expensive that they're afraid to drive it, they also don't want to make their car capable of achieving warp factor three. They just want this car that they dearly love to be able to cruise around smoothly and reliably, without having it dump them out on the side of the road or have it start making weird noises or belching out big clouds of funky-smelling smoke. And I think, truth be told, that this is by far the largest class of Mustang owners. They take their car to some technician when what they actually need is a mechanic, and this, frequently, does not work out very well at all for the owner. They don't want to re-engineer the entire car, they just want someone to fix what broke. These are the people that I am trying help out with this blog. Some problems require a little bit of back and forth, as in, "Try this." "I tried that and it didn't change anything."
" Oh. well, you probably need to try that." " I tried that and it helped, but it still isn't quite right." "Now you need to try this...." If you go to http://www.allfordmustangs.com/ and then go to the classics forums, you will be able to do that with a pretty hefty gathering of some very knowledgeable people that also happen to be very friendly. None of that ridiculous one-upmanship, no flaming or abuse, none of that stuff. Just good, solid advice from people that know what they are talking about.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Happy birthday

I just noticed that it was one year ago today that I started this blog. Woooohoooo!! Happy birthday, blog.
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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Mustang back up lights 1965 and 1966


Here's how that system is supposed to work.

This is the system for a car with an automatic transmission. A black wire with a red stripe comes out of the fuse box, goes out through the firewall, then dives down to the transmission. On the side of the transmission, where the shift linkage is attached, is the neutral safety switch. This switch does two things. It prevents the car from starting when it's not in Park or Neutral, and, it sends power to the reverse lights when the shifter is in the Reverse position. The black wire with the red stripe goes into the neutral safety switch and comes back out of the switch, goes back through the firewall, and the goes to the back of the car with the tail light feed harness, which runs from under the dash, then underneath the driver's side door sill plate, and back into the trunk area.
A manual transmission car has that black wire with the red stripe coming out of the fuse box, and then running underneath the carpet and down through a hole in the floor right behind the shifter, where it goes into a reverse light switch which is positioned in such a way that, when the shifter is in the reverse position, the shifter arm pushes the button on the switch. The black wire with the red stripe then comes back up through the floor, back out from under the carpet, and then joins up with the tail light feed, and goes to the trunk area, just like on an automatic car.
The most common problems with this system are either that the bulbs are burned out, or the ground wire from the reverse light housings have been disconnected or cut, or just got all corroded and funky-looking, or, on an automatic car, the neutral safety switch has gone stupid on you. On a manual tranny car, the same things could happen with the bulbs or the ground, it's just the reverse light switch that goes stupid instead of the neatral safety switch, since it doesn't have a neutral safety switch. If the lights stay on all of the time when the key is in the 'On' position, that is almost certainly a defective switch.
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