Nice Hurst Dual Gate shifter

 

Thanks. I love the way it looks, but have often wondered if I'd like the way the B&M Megashifter functions better...

 

Megashifter is fugly IMO.. Maybe for old school drag only cars.. I like a shorter, more stock looking shifter. Personal opinion tho.

 

Duster, how was the install of the cable-x box? I need to get something for my car, but hesitant to buy one until I get back to where my car is. Nice looking swap btw.

 

Thank you. It took a long time to get to this point.

The Cable-X installed pretty easily. A simple 3-wire hook-up of power, ground & speed signal. The unit has 12 dip switches that have to be turned on or off in the proper combination to match the pulses per mile sent from your speed sensor or pcm.

If you're receiving signal directly from the speed sensor you need to use a formula provided in the instructions to calculate your ppm based upon the number of exciter teeth on your output shaft (17 for T56 or 40 for 4L60E), tire revolutions per mile (based on tire height) & axle ratio.

If receiving signal from the pcm, it should be sending 4,000 no matter what. I guess it could be a different value, which can be verified in your tune. The key is that the values for your axle ratio & tire height be correct in your tune also, otherwise the Cable-X will drive the speedometer at the wrong speed.

For my set-up, I used HP Tuners software to change my axle ratio & tire height, then verified it was sending 4,000 ppm. The model I received was a Cable-X-30, which uses a motor that turns slower than the standard model, & requires you to use a multiplier of .267 against your ppm (4,000), which came to 1,068. A chart in the instructions tells you which of the 12 switches need to be turned on. In my case, it was switches 6,7,9 & 11, as you can see in the picture below.

 

Thanks, good info. Right now, I'm just window shopping until I can get back to my car next year, I'd rather not ship it to where I'm at.

 

I'm convinced there was some production variance or something on the a/c box, which may be why some have clearance issues with #8 coil & others do not. The original from my car was broken, so I got one from an '84, which needed to be modified for clearance. Then I broke that one during one of my 5-6 (I lost count) engine re-install's. I acquired another, this time from an '88. It needed even more material to be removed. Pictures below show my current coil clearance with the '88 box, modified '84 box, and my unmodified original.

If any of you had no problems with coil clearance, what year is your car?

 

I'd read that your tach may not be accurate after an LS conversion, so I wasn't surprised when mine didn't register the correct rpm's. I was planning to buy a tach signal converter from Dakota Digital, but after researching the topic on a few forum's, I figured out how to correct it using HP Tuners.

The PCM sends out a signal used for a 4 cylinder tachometer. Changing the values for the Tach Output in the tune can correct this so the tach's in our car's will read correctly. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as telling the software how many cyliners your tach is made to work with, but it's not difficult. The values for "Tach Output" in my stock tune were 6. This comes from the number of teeth on the crank reluctor wheel (my LS1 has 24), divided by the number of cylinders the tach is intended to read (the LS1 tach was 4 cyl). 24/4=6. Using the same formula for my 8 cylinder tach, 24/8=3. Therefore 3 is the value I needed in the "Resolution - High" & "Resolution - Low" fields in the tune.

Below are pictures of how my tach read compared to the reading on an Actron scanner. First picture shows tach reading before I changed the tune, second shows the fields that need to be changed in HP Tuners, & third shows tach reading with the new tune. With the values set to 6 it was reading too low & never read higher than 2500 rpm. With the values set to 3 the tach reads just like it should.

At some point I'd like to change to a stock 6-cylinder tach because they have a 6000 rpm redline. Once again, using the same formula, the value I'll need to use for that one is 4.

 

I checked the website where the Cable-X can be purchased. It says 70 mph in the discription. Is that the maximum speed it registers? I have emailed them but I'm still waiting in their reply.

 

The one you're looking at is a tach drive. The units that drive a speedometer are not limited to 70 mph.

 

Here are some pictures of my exhaust. I used the Hawks off road y-pipe & a Flowmaster muffler with 3" in/2 .5" outs. A local exhaust shop made the intermediate pipe & tailpipes. The y-pipe was engineered to be slip-fit into the collector's of the longtube headers. I decided to add v-band clamps to both ends of the y-pipe just in case I need to take it apart for some reason down the road.

 

More exhaust pictures...

 

...more again.

 

Hey, lots of really good information on here and I stumbled across this little gem. I'm currently working on my gauges right now and this is the one thats giving me the most heart burn. I have the box and I have the VSS sensor. My PCM is already tuned to my car specifications thanks to the good people at PSI Conversion. What do you think is the best route? I've heard a few different things and it's making my brain hurt.

 

Are you asking about the speedometer or all the gauges? What box are you referring to? Just need more info...

 

The speedometer. I have the cable-x box off of Hawks Third Gen but after some digging on google, I found the actualy company that makes the box and they had a pretty handy guide, lots of info.

 

I got my Cable-X from Hawks too. It came with very detailed instructions. You should have it working in no time.