Anyone ever converted an Edsel Teletouch to a manual control ? Beings the steering column is specific to the Teletouch, would a floor shift be the easiest ?
is it a junior (Ranger, Pacer) or senior (Corsair, Citation)? Junior is like a Ford, senior is like a Merc.
I have seen one done with a shift lever mounted under the dash. It was not a conventional auto floor shifter, more like a pull-handle type under dash handbrake lever.
I think @squirrel may be suggesting you look at same year Mercury for an alternative to the Edsel setup. Phil
I don't remember much about these either other than they are electric controll with a lot of things that can give your Grief. As I remember biggest issue was dirty contacts or frayed wires. Might help if you told us what it is or isn't doing that makes you want to dig into it. Most often it's understand how it works that get's you back to it doing it's job.
If I remember correctly, if you want to go to conventional column shift lever that change over takes you all the way inside the trans.
I found the main problem with the Teletouch is heat. Driving on a hot day with the exhaust nearby the shift motor tends to slow down or not work at all. Kind of like a heat soaked starter motor. What makes it worse is 95% of the time the heat shield is discarded by the mechanic trying to service the transmission. A regular automatic column shift was available on them and I'm sure a 58-59 Ford column would be close to a bolt-in.
Fords and Mercurys were different in 58, and this edsel is like the merc, not the ford. So the ford column probably won't be close to a bolt in.
I don't know what goes on inside one but I remember that my dad had one and on a hot summer day while driving across the desert in Utah it shifted into low and stayed there. When you are 7 years old it is hard to understand why we are only going 15 MPH while everyone else is passing you by. Naturally the kids in the back seat weren't allowed to say anything for fear of getting smacked.
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