heater control cables... replacements

[derek murray]

i have to replace a couple of heater control cables (dash control, not the hand lever / flapper box cable). i woke up to a bit of snow on the ground yesterday morning... a little warm air would be welcome...

i was wondering if the cables are something special or if i can fashion my own... they seem to be quite similiar to bicycle cables.

any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

[jmohn]

From just looking at them they appear to be the same as any other similar control cable (e.g. hand choke or lawn mower throttle contol cable), however I haven't pulled the dash control unit to see how they're connected at that end, they may have some difficult to replicate factory connection. BTW I just replaced one of my flapper box control cables using the inner control wire from a universal, replacement, lawn mower throttle cable; it's Sunday and I didn't have many sources available but this appears to be exactly the same kind of stiffened control wire and it works fine. The trickiest part was making the connection at the lever end, I had to feed the new cable up from the flapper box end (couldn't get it to go through the other way) and making a neat connection to the lever in that tight little space was "interesting". I want to drive it tomorrow and it's getting cold in Minnesota too so I knew I'd need that heater box working.

Good luck,

Jerry M
'78 SC