Broken Gear Shifter

This fix is hardly necessary, but it just looked awful and I couldn’t in good conscience leave it this way.

I’m not really sure what the hell happened here, I can only assume a dog ate it.

Anyhow, I went online to find the replacement, which of course wasn’t straight-forward, because, why would it be? I learned that this vehicle may or may not have overdrive, and depending on that, it would determine which handle goes here. So I turned to the Aerostar Facebook community for answers...

And the experts weighed in, and told me it was B. And a week or so later...

I also later found the little button that snaps into the end of this on eBay. Then the weekend came and it was time to do the swaparoo. Thankfully I found YouTube video tutorials because it was a little intense...

After tearing apart the entire dashboard, it was out! Here is the old and new.

While I was all up in the dashboard biz, I decided to replace all the bulbs in the instrument panel / speedometer, which I really wouldn’t have even thought of, but I noticed it looked pretty burnt out at night already...

And then it was time to reassemble. I’ll spare you the boring stuff and get to the finished product.

I also took this time to bring all the dashboard pieces inside and scrub them down before reconnecting them.

Looking good!

The bad news is...one of the bulbs that was burnt out was the check engine light, and now it’s shining bright!