Technical How to adjust and setup the Neutral Safety switch on Lokar and Gennie Shifters

I found a solution to the problem a lot of guys have experienced with the setup and reliability of the style of neutral safety switch that is used in these shifters.

The problem seems to be in the setup during installation. You can’t just screw the switch into the shifter and hook up the wires and expect it to work.

Here’s the procedure.
First of all install the shifter with no neutral safety switch installed.
Make sure that the linkage is installed correctly and that you can go properly from park through all of the gears and back to park smoothly without running the engine of course.

After that you can thread in the switch and start the adjustment.

You’ll need a 12 volt battery and a ground wire and a test light.

Ground one side of the switch and then you can test the operation of the switch with the test light by moving through the gears.

I found that with the switch seated all the way into the shifter body there’s no way it was going to work.

So I loosened it in the threads and started looking for the sweet spot where it worked giving me no power in neutral and no power in park.

At that point I grabbed my feeler gauges and measured what I needed to shim the switch.

I found that a .049” thick shim would allow the switch to be tightened down and maintain the sweet spot for operation.
Of course it’s likely that the shim will be a different thickness for another installation.

It’s working perfectly and I’m sure it will continue to.
Hopefully this will help someone out with this.
Larry.

 

Excellent--went thru the same exercise on one in a 39 woody. Did as you did--adjusted shifter then played with the switch an an OHM meter--found the same--all the way screwed in it did not work--backed it out til it did then shimmed accordingly--still working but you would think they would know this and mention/provide shims.

 

I'm curious... Ford mounted the neutral safety/back-up light switch on the C4 trans in most application, is there some reason to remove it?

 

Not on all applications.

Not all Ford C4 equipped models came that way.
Floor shifted cars definitely did but column shifted cars didn’t.

The 73 Maverick I pulled the transmission from was a column shift car.

They have a neutral safety /back up switch mounted on the steering column.

Here’s the column mounted switch.