Normally when my friends call me up with electrical stuff going on, it goes something like this, “Hey, can you help me wire up this dang-blamed neon sign?” Or, “I accidentally hooked the Jeep directly into the wall outlet to charge it; can you help me fix it?”
The kit comes with the LED...
The kit comes with the LED shifter indicator, the fancy shifter sensor, wiring, and a fuse all built in. The destructions are pretty good, but we decided to change a couple of things. At the time I wrote this story, the company who makes it, CLD Specialties, only lists a TJ as the Jeep it is available for. I think that it could be made to work for anything with a straight line automatic shifter and the company is full of good people, so they might just work with ya if you have a Jeep other than the one I just mentioned.
This time was different. My bud Cody found a neat shifter indicator for his automatic Jeep TJ and asked me if I’d want to do a column on it. I’m not one for those slushboxes, but I like reviewing new stuff and seeing how it’s put together. So I told Cody I’d check it out next time I saw him. Turns out the thing is pretty neat, so I agreed we’d put our heads together and do a column on it.
Well, when the time came to do the column, Cody’d got some rebar stuck in his foot or some such silliness, so when I showed up at his ranch, he called over our other buddy Kurt to help do the install. I told him I could do it, but he insisted I just take pictures and whatever notes I needed.
There were some good songs on the radio, but I didn’t have a tape recorder, and we didn’t actually bang our heads together so I didn’t take any notes or headache medicine. It was kind of weird not actually doing the wiring stuff and only taking pictures of it. I wonder if this is what the swimsuit photographers feel like. I could get used to this. OK, I might have helped a little and suggested a thing or two, but I still like to think taking pictures of pretty girls in swimsuits might be in my future. I am a photographer now with a resume and everything.
This fancy sensor is the heart...
This fancy sensor is the heart of the setup and even me, who’s broken…uh…taken apart more things than you can count, can’t tell ya what is in it. That big fork-looking thing slides around the floor-mounted shifter lever and mounts to the underside of the shifter cover. This is a great system for someone with a non-stock console, or who, like me, thinks it is dumb to have to look near your feet to see what gear the Jeep is in.
We modified the kit with this...
We modified the kit with this GM Weatherpak connector. We were putting the setup in Cody’s Jeep that has a heavy-duty metal console and we (me and Kurt) felt that the easiest way to run the wires was to put this connector in there. If you don’t have one you can run the wires just like the destructions say, but you’ll have a harder time than we did.
If that fancy sensor is the...
If that fancy sensor is the heart then this display is the brain. The lights are bright enough to see during the day, but not too bright at night. Even though the instructions tell us to put the display on top of the steering column, we thought it looked better right here in front of the rollbar. The different gears light up with different color LEDs, so even if you can spot a tick on a hound dog at 100 yards but can’t see in front of your face without glasses, you can tell what gear you are in.