Okay, so I have had a mystery in my car for about two months now. I could not make my back up lights work regardless of all I did. I did several searches online, checked Haynes and Chilton and nothing. When I removed the exhaust manifold, I found what I believe to be the back up component attached to the transmission.

My question is: is this the thing that controls the back up signal sent to the lights? If so, I think the answer might be in repairing the red cable that was caught by the manifold.

Has anyone had any experience with something like this?





I am hoping that fixing this will solve this damn problem that has kept me awake sometimes late at night

 

The big red cable? Thats your starter solenoid. The back up switch iirc is on the floor shifter or column.

 

Yeah, sounds like your neutral safety switch has gone out. Try looking that up in your Chilton/Haynes and see if that fixes it for you. They're fairly cheap ranging from 8 - 18 bucks depending on. The one for my B&M shifter is 16 bucks so I would assume a stock one is cheaper to some degree.

 

Thanks, Kyphur, yes I researched it more and it seems that I need a switch made for my Hurst shifter. See, the guy that owned the car before me canceled out the column shifter and put in a floor shifter. I guess he forgot to hook up the switch or something. So now I had to go back to the Hurst Quarter Stick installation manual to see what I can do. We'll see. Once again, thanks.

 

btw, looking at your starter solenoid in the pics above. It looks like your battery cable (red wire) was getting really close or leaning up against your headers/manifolds. You may want to loosen the nut and angle the wire away from the headers/manifold when you put them back on. This can cause a lot of problems since you have a live wire coming directly from the battery to the solenoid and it's exposed up against the headers (metal). You can either patch that wire or just get a new one. If you have a lot of excess length on it just cut it a bit shorter and re-crimp the end with a large connector. If you don't have the length then just pull that one and measure it then go get a new one.

 

Yeah, thank you, I am going to do something about that soon.