Speedometer Driven Gear Type 3 21-Tooth Automatic/Manual Transmission Mustang 1965-1998

If you're a subscriber to our YouTube channel, you're probably familiar with the '67 Mustang convertible. We've already upgraded the lighting, stereo, carpet, and quite a few other things along the way. What you're probably not aware of, we've been stuck pushing this car around our shop for the last two months, ever since the stock 3-speed transmission gave out. While we could rebuild the 3-speed, in our opinion, if something breaks, it's a good time for an upgrade. So today, we're going to give the '67 two more forward gears by doing a T5 conversion using parts from Ford Racing and Modern Driveline.

Our supreme T5 conversion kit features a world class Ford Racing T5 and everything needed to install it in a manual transmission equipped Mustang. If your Mustang's originally an automatic, you will need a clutch pedal assembly as well. For this installation, you need a lift or a jack and jack stands, 1/2" ratchet, 3/8 ratchet, 1/4" ratchet, 6" 3/8 extension, 12" 3/8 extension, 3/4" 12 point socket, 5/8 deep socket, 5/8 shallow socket, 9/16 deep socket, 9/16 shallow socket, 1/2" deep socket, 1/2" shallow socket, T6 hex bit, 3/8 swivel, 9/32 socket, breaker bar, 5/8 wrench, 9/16 wrench, 1/2" wrench, adjustable wrench, pry bar, needle nose pliers, wire strippers, wire stripping tool, hammer, slide hammer, drill, 3/8 drill bit, 1/8 drill bit, marker, flashlight, aerosol, U-joint press, and safety glasses.

The first step to start the installation of our 5-speed is to remove the original components. We're going to start by pulling the shifter, then we'll move under the car and work on the transmission. We'll pull up to remove our metal plate. The boot's going to be held to your transmission tunnel by four 7/16 screws you'll have to remove. The best way to do this is to push the transmission forward, using an open end of a ratcheting wrench, and come in from the side. We're going to unscrew our shift ball and remove our shift boot. We're going to remove these two bolts here to remove our shift lever. Once our shift arm is removed, we're ready to start work under the car.

Now that we're underneath our car, we've got a few obstacles we're going to run into. Being this car is 46 years old, it's lived a long life before it made it here, and a couple things changed underneath. In the case of our car, it's got some old long tube headers on it. We're pretty sure they're going to clear the T5 bell housing, but we're not going to know until we get it up into place. The exhaust has also been replaced at some point in time. The whole, entire assembly has been welded. So we're going to have to cut it off to be able to remove it, to get our transmission. Before we cut our H pipe, we're going to remove this fork plate. This is only going to be found on a convertible. You're not going to have this on your coupe or fastback. Once you make your way to the last bolt, you'll want to hold the plate; it's heavier than you think it's going to be.

Now we're ready to cut our exhaust system off. You want to pick a spot that's easy to get to, not only for cutting it, but also for welding or putting a clamp on it later. Now we're going to disconnect our H pipe at our headers. We'll leave the top bolt in just to support the weight of our H pipe. We'll get a good grip on it and remove that bolt, and remove our H pipe. Before we can move on to pulling the drive shaft, we want to hit the drain of the transmission and get as much fluid out as possible. Once we get most of the fluid out, we're going to put our plug back in. We don't need to tighten it all the way, just give it one or two turns.

To remove our drive shaft, we're going to pull the two retainer nuts off the back on each side. Just hold onto the drive shaft and turn them. Push up on the U joint, and pull it out. Next we're going to remove the starter. The bottom bolt's pretty easy to get to, but the top one we'll have to use an extension or a swivel of some sort. Headers are going to make it a little bit harder, but you got to get it off though. We're going to hang it down, just got to remove the wire. While we're here, we'll get the two bolts off the transmission separator plate. Now we're going to separate the equalizer bar-clutch bar linkage, and remove this little cotter pin that holds it onto the bar. And we'll just pry this off. Now we're just going to disconnect the spring.

Now we can start on removing the transmission from the bell housing. First thing we're going to do is take the speedometer cable off. Then we're going to pull off our reverse light switch. Our T5 uses a different style switch, so we're going to need the wiring, but we're not going to need the switch itself. Then we're going to remove the four bolts that hold our transmission to our bell housing, two on the bottom, and little two up top. Then we're going to work on the bolts for the crossmember. These are usually the most rusted bolts in this job. It'll take a little bit of work to get them off. Once we get that off, we're going to leave the bolt in place. Just get the nut off for now. We'll do the same thing on the other side. A lot of times, these are so badly rusted they're just going to break off. There's nothing wrong with that. We're going to use a new mount and a new crossmember with our T5. We'll use our small pry bar to just make sure everything is separated.

After getting everything loose back here, your transmission's going to start separating from your bell housing. Put our pry bar in there and kind of push them apart as well. Okay, once we have everything separated, we're ready to support our transmission, pull off our crossmember, and remove our 3-speed. We've got our transmission in place to hold our 3-speed. Any kind of a jack will work, you just want to make sure you support the weight before you take the crossmember out. Now we're going to remove the bolts. Since we're hanging up on our E brake cable a little bit, we're going to take some tension off of it so we can move the cable out of the way.

Now that our 3-speed's out of the way, we can see our factory bell housing and fork. The next step is to remove this. There are six bolts holding our bell housing to our engine, two down here, two at the very top, and then two along the side here. Like most jobs, you want to start with the harder bolts to get to, and save the easy ones for last. We're going to remove the throw out bearing and throw that aside, and now we're ready to remove our bell housing.

Now that we've got the bell out of the way, we're going to remove the six bolts that hold the clutch to the flywheel, two here, two on this side, and two on top. The six flywheel bolts can be tough to get off. What we usually recommend is you take two of the clutch bolts you just removed, thread them back in just a couple turns so that they're in. Now what you want to do is get a pry bar. We'll put it between the two bolts. We usually hit the frame, or in our case we'll hit the header. That'll lock it in place so the engine doesn't turn as you remove your flywheel bolts. We're going to use our pry bar, and remove our flywheel.

Now we'll take off our original separator plate. Now we're going to remove the equalizer bar, since we're not going to use it. Now you unbolt it and you slide the bracket over. You'll be able to slide your equalizer bar off of the pivot. Now we'll disconnect it from the block. Now we're going to remove the stud off the side of the block. And now we're going to remove the cotter pin that holds the equalizer bar on. We'll separate the equalizer bar from the rod and take it out of the car. Now we have everything apart, we're going to clean up a little bit in here, and we're ready to install our new T5.

This is an important step that you don't want to miss. With a T5, you need to use this rollarized pilot bearing. The factory is going to have a pilot bushing, which we have to remove with the slide hammer, and then install the bearing before we put everything back together. There you can see the difference between your original bushing and the new bearing we're going to have to install. We'll put a little Anti-seize on the bearing. What we want to do is hold it in place, grab a socket about the same diameter as it, and hammer it in. We'll install our new separator plate, line it up with the factory dowels, and we're ready to install our flywheel.

Before we install the flywheel, we'll put a little bit of Loctite on each of the new flywheel bolts, put the new flywheel up into place. Now we'll install our new ARP bolts. Now we'll get our flywheel bolts a little tight before we torque them down. Now we'll install two of the new metric screws for our clutch. Now we can use a pry bar to hold our engine in place while we torque our flywheel bolts down. Now we torqued them all to 75 foot pound. We're going to go in a crossing pattern. Now we'll install the dowels in our flywheel for our clutch. We'll want to put our disk onto our pressure plate, and put the whole assembly up into place.

Now we'll install the six clutch bolts. Now we'll just get them snug before we torque them. Before we torque our clutch plate down, we're going to use the supplied alignment tool, make sure the disk is lined up with our bearing. We'll leave that in there for now, and torque down the bolts. We're going to start by torquing everything to 12 foot pounds. Now we'll re-torque everything to 25 foot pounds.

Now we're ready to install our bell housing. Because of our long tubes, it'll take a little bit of work to get up into place, but since we got the original one off, we should be able to get this one in. Okay, I never thought that would be that easy. The six bell housing bolts that you removed, there's going to be four longer ones and two shorter ones. The shorter ones are going to go on the top. Now we're going to install the two bolts we took out on the engine side.

Before we install our T5, we're going to upgrade the provided shifter from Ford Racing to this Power Tower by Pro-5.0. The Power Tower's going to give us adjustable stop. It's going to be a beefier shifter than the stock included shifter. Removing the original shifter is easy. Just got to remove these four bolts. Remove the bolts and you pop the shifter off. Those are a little bit tight. If your transmission has a little too much sealant in it, grab a small pry bar and you pry it off as well. We want to make sure this cup does not come out with the original shifter. That has to stay in there for installation of the Pro-5.0. Usually you want to put new gasket material on an older transmission. Since this transmission is brand new, the gasket material is still fine to install our new shifter. Make sure that ball goes right into the cup. Get it in place, then we can bolt it down. The Pro-5.0 shifter comes with new hardware as well, which we're going to use for installation.

Now before we can install our transmission, we're going to install our clutch fork and our throw out bearing. Working from the back here. Now the springs are right on the end of the pivot. Once we have the fork and throw out bearing in, we're ready to put our T5 in. You want to line the input shaft up with the throw out bearing. When we get it lined up, we'll slowly push it forward. We'll need to wiggle this a little bit, and it'll pop into place.

Once you have the transmission in place, you'll install the four bolts to hold the transmission to the bell housing; they're included with the bell housing. Before we install our crossmember, we'll do a little bit of trimming of our floor up here. You can see our Pro-5.0, due to the ring here, is much larger than the stock shifter. It'll require a little bit of trimming. If you stick with the stock shifter, this step wouldn't be necessary. Now we've got enough clearance, we're ready to start installing our crossmember. We'll end up removing the factory lower boot retainer, since we're not going to use it with our T5 anyway.

Now we're going to install our transmission mount for our T5. We want to make sure this little bump is facing the back of the car. Now we're going to jack up our transmission so we can line up our crossmember, get it approximately into place, then grab your crossmember. The slotted holes are going to go on your driver's side. Right through here, just get an idea of where the studs are going to come through for the motor mount and get that adjusted, and now we can tighten it down. Now we're going to install the crossmember. The crossmember is going to be real tight on the rails over here, especially if you have undercutting of some sort. It's not unusual to have to use a hammer to just kind of hammer it up into place. With the one side lined up, we'll want to put a bolt through. We're going to push the other side up into place. When we get the bolt on the one side, we can actually let down our trans jack. Now we'll put washers on the other side, and we tighten them down. We'll install the nuts in the bottom of our motor mount.

Now we're ready to install our yoke onto our conversion drive shaft. If you've never done a U-joint before, a local drive shaft shop can probably do this for you for only a couple bucks. We're going to show you how to do it though. The caps are simply going to slide off. Put the yoke into place. The caps then have to be pressed through the yoke back on. In our case we have a tool to do that. You can try hammering them on, or try with a vice as well. We'll install our snap ring. If the ring doesn't pop all the way in, use a 16-mm socket, give it couple whacks with a hammer to get it to pop in place.

Now we'll install our drive shaft. Line up the yoke, fits into place, slide it back until it's touching; it's best to turn it sideways or hold it in place. Now you can grab your caps and bolt them back down. We'll get the retainersin place, and then we can slide it all the way back.

While the factory starter would have worked, we're going to upgrade to this XS Torque starter from Power Master. The Power Master is a two-wire starter. Since our early Mustang has a separate starter solenoid, you have to make a little jumper wire to go between the two terminals before we install it. We'll connect the starter to the starter wire before we put it up into place. We want to get the connection snug, but you don't want to overtighten it. Now we can push our starter up into place.

Now we'll install our new speedometer gear. Quickly pop this little metal clip off, and slide the old gear off, slide on our new 21 tooth, and slide the clip into place. We'll put the retaining bolt on for the speedo.

Now we're going to modify the factory backup lights to work with the backup lights on our T5. So we're going to cut the harness; give yourself a decent amount of space. Trim the sheath back so you can get to the wires. Now we're going to strip these. We'll install our solderless connects. Now we'll connect our new backup light switch to our wire terminals. There is no right or wrong here. As long as they're both connected it's going to work properly. We'll put a little tape over our connections. We're going to fish the wire up here, up to this factory plug right here, and plug it in. We'll put an extra zip tie in place, just to keep our wires up safely out of the way. We're going to reconnect our E-brake cables.

We already removed the clutch linkage and the Z-bar from underneath. The last step in removing the original linkage, get the clutch rod off from the clutch pedal. So we pull this cotter pin, and separate, and pull through the firewall. Since we're removing the master cylinder, we're going to want to pull the pins to the brake pedal as well while we're in here. Now we're going to disconnect our brake lines from our master cylinder so we can remove the master. Now we can remove our master cylinder. Once the master cylinder is removed, we're going to remove these two top bolts as well so we can install our plate.

Now we're going to temporarily install the clutch cable plate. We'll use these two holes here to hold it in place so we can mark the hole for our cable. Now we're going to use the marker to mark a hole where we're going to drill, get right in the center. Now we'll remove the plate so we can drill our hole. We're going to start by drilling a pilot hole for our clutch cable. It's going to be right where we marked it, right up in here. Now with our pilot hole drilled, we're going to open it up to 3/8. Now we're ready to install our bracket. First we're going to put the cable through the opening. Now we're ready to bolt the plate to our firewall. We're going to have to fish the cable underneath our export brace and our Monte Carlo bar. We'll pull it straight out the front. Slide the cable through the hole we just drilled, and line up the plate. Now we're going to rotate the entire cable to thread it in. When it's all the way in, we'll use a jam nut to lock it in place.

Now we're going to reinstall our master cylinder. Now we're going to reconnect our brake lines. Since our car was originally a stick shift car, it comes with this body plug to put where the clutch rod goes through the firewall. If you have an automatic, you'll want to skip this step. You'll go right down here below the speedometer cable.

Now we're ready to move on underneath the dash. The first thing we're going to do is remove the clutch pedal assist spring. That's accessed by removing these three bolts attached to the steering column. Since most of this assembly process is done way up underneath the dashboard, we set up a Go Pro to try to get you the best video we can. If you're having trouble getting the bracket attached to the clevis, we pull out this fresh air vent and make it a little bit easier. For this step, you'll want to have somebody inside the car hold onto the clevis, while someone from the outside turns the cable to thread it in. We want to thread it in until it bottoms out, and then use the lock nut on the cable to hold it in place. We're going to install the bracket supplied on the kit on the side of the clutch pedal assembly. Now we're tightening the hardware that holds the bracket to the clutch pedal itself. Once you're finished with the bracket, you want to reattach your brake master cylinder to your brake pedal, and hook back up your brake switch.

Once we have everything assembled underneath the dash, now we're ready to fish the clutch cable down around, down to our bell housing. We want to make sure it's underneath any bracing the car may have. We're going to go down around the filter into the motor mount area. Now we're going to go underneath the car and route it back to our bell housing. Now we'll fish it around our filter. We'll come down between the bottom of the motor mount and the oil pan area, straight through to our bell housing. You want to make sure when you go through here, you want to have a decent amount of clearance between the headers and the cable itself. It does come with this thermal sleeve that you want to put on the cable where it comes closest to the header.

Now we're going to install a seat clip to hold the cable to the bell housing. We're going to run threads on the adjusting nut and the lock nut out towards the end. We're not going to tighten it yet. Now we're going to go check our pedal travel and see how much pedal we have. Now we're going to test our clutch pedal to make sure we've got a good, solid feel. The pedal comes back like it's supposed to. There are two places you can adjust your clutch cable. There's an adjustment on the cable itself with a fork. There's another adjustment at the firewall. We want to use the firewall for small adjustments, and use this for larger adjustments. We need to tighten our cable up a little and remove the lock nut. We're just going to thread this in just a little bit. We'll reinstall the lock nut, and we'll test it again.

To be able to fine tune the clutch cable, we're going to have to be able to drive our car. We're going to reinstall our H-pipe and put the support plate back on the floor. We'll put the bolts on first, and then the gaskets. We're going to use the band clamp to temporarily attach our H-pipe to our muffler so we can take our car for a test drive. Eventually, we'll pop these back off, and we'll re-weld. Now we're going to reinstall our floor support plate.

Before we actually move the car, we want to put some fluid in the T5 because they ship dry. There are two plugs in the side. The lower one is going to be your drain. The upper is going to be your fill. Just take a 3/8 ratchet and take the plug out. We're going to use this fluid pump to fill up our transmission. You can also run a flexible funnel down through the transmission hole and fill it that way as well. It'll take right around 3 quarts to fill your transmission. Once we reach the point where it's dripping out of the fill tube, it's full. We'll put the plug back in.

Once you fill the transmission with fluid, we're almost ready for our test drive. Because we had the master cylinder disconnected, we want to bleed the brakes first, then you can install the shifter, and get ready to take it for a test drive. Now we're going to install our shifter handle for our T5 transmission. We're putting on a console for our '67, so we're going to go with a generic 4-speed boot for now, with a cut out designed for the Hurst shifter. We're going to use this white Hurst 5-speed ball.

Five-speed swaps can make any Mustang a lot more fun to drive. The car's going to accelerate faster because of the better gear ratios, plus the overdrive makes it a lot nicer on the highway. Figure on a long weekend to get the installation done. With some hand tools and some patience, you'll be back on the road in no time.