Well, after a few trials & tribulations I finally fired the Maverick last night. A project(EFI Motor), I thought would take about 90 days, took 6 months. I ran into a few issues when I went to fire it 2 weeks ago. First, the heater pipe to the intake was leaking at the threads at the intake & I couldn't get it to seal off. Moral of the story, once you remove one of these heater pipes, it takes the threads out of the aluminum intake with it. So, I had to replace the intake(no easy task with all the crap attached to it). Then the next problem was I was getting no spark. I traced it down to the ignition module & repalaced it. Still no spark. Since I had narrowed it down to the distributor, all that was left was the stator. What a joke to change one of those! You have to remove the distributor & then remove the drift pins & press off the gear & collar in a press. The shaft must be removed from the housing to replace the stator. Give me a break! Who engineered this crap! Moral of the story, this was the only used part that I utilized that had the unknown factor of whether it worked or not. Bought it off of ebay for $20. At this point, I'm praying that the car now starts. Oh, it started all right...in gear & started to take off up my driveway! The shifter linkage wasn't attached yet. I got it shut off before the car hit anything. I guess, I need to take a look as to why the neutral safety switch isn't working properly. Aren't these projects fun! We all need to see a shrink!
what tranny are you running???.....the reason I ask is which neutral safety switch..........if you are using the factory mav one on the coloum and your coloum shifter was in park........well it's gonna start no matter what gear the tranny is.........but if your runnin an AOD,AODE,or 4R70W.....and it's on the tranny then thats a different creature all together......just curious P.S. glad you did'nt plow any thing(you have a really nice lookin car) years ago I had one fire up in gear on me and crush my bottom tool box..........now that sucked......we will learn from what does'nt kill us!!!!
I'm running the original C4 trans & I moved the shifter to the floor. I unplugged the neutral safety switch in the column & removed it & used the shifter housing mounted neutral safety switch from a 73 Mustang. I then wired it to the original neutral safety switch harness. I'm think that it started in gear because the shifter was in the park position, but the shifter arm to the trans was not attached yet & I mistakenly left the trans in gear from underneath the car. Well, there's one advantage to having a trans mounted neutral safety switch, as that wouldn't have happened.
Well, I have the same neutral safety switch problem as you. I changed my column shift C4 to floor shift, and put a switch on the tranny. I wired it up, and it still will start in gear. The back up lights work and everything. I discovered by accident that if you shift the column collar into a gear position (even thought not hooked up to the tranny) it won't start. This means there is a switch inside the column that is the actual safety switch. -Corbin
I changed the column collar to the floor shift non rotating collar column type & removed the neutral safety switch, so that can't be the problem with mine. I believe that since my shifter was in the park position & the trans was not...that is why it started in gear.
Mine starts in gear My original C-4 column will start in gear now as it is, if I am going down the highway, and it dies,(fixed that by the way) I could just crank it back up in D. I dunno Preston