Today my girlfriend and I where headed up to Estes Park to have lunch and to walk around the cool old town. As were driving up the steep mountian roads my throttle body cable snaps. At first I have no idea what it was, all I know is that I am going up a steep hill with no gas pedal.

So we coast as far as we could which ended up not being very far. Since there was really no pull off I was half off the road and half in the road which was really ****ty considering we where right on the other side of a blind corner. I could not pull off the road since I had to gas pedal.

So we are freaking out hoping not to get hit and what not. So I call my girlfriends, moms boyfriend who is a firefighter. He says to put it in 4 low and let out the clutch slowly. So I did, and my truck started to move about 1 MPH but it was enought to get my up the hill aways so I could pull off and check out my truck.

I get out and start to check things out and find that the problem lies in the engine bay. I pop the hood and starting looking around the throttle body to see what was up. I had some tools with me so I took off the throttle body cover and see that the cable had snapped.

I ended up messin with it for about a half hour and figured out a way to "jerry rig it". I tied the cable in to a not and attached a few zip ties to the throttle body lever that actually moves. It worked good enough to let me drive 40 miles to my dads house to get it fixed.

All I know is I am glad I didnt get hit and that I had some tools and parts to help me get it done.

Just remeber guys.... always keep some tools and spare parts like zip ties and duck tape in your truck.

BTW, the new throttle body cable is alot different then my old one. It doesnt have the green spring attached to it. Works great though.

You can see in the pic right after the turn there is a reflector pole. I stoped right before that post. As you can see no room to pull over.





The evil culprit



My new cable does not have the green spring on it. Does anyone elses not look like this?

 

well that sucks don't it. glad you got it patched. I had to do that once with a ford f250 flatbed a buddy lent me to tow a car to the garage. I had to jerry-rig the clutch linkage as everything fell apart after I stopped.

 

Never heard of that happening before,glad you were able to fix it to get home.

 

The same thing happened to Kevin's (2002fx4) truck. The cable broke. The new one did not have a spring on it on the end that goes to the pedal. We put it on his truck at least 6 months ago. No problems at all so far(that i know about, shoot he was driving the truck last night, as he came to my house in the truck)

The price i paid for the cable from ford was not that bad. It was $20 (my uncle is the parts manager)

 

I was going to ask if you had the TC mod and if so how many zip ties, but if looks like you only had one on there. That doesn't seem to be the cause. Glad you were able to get home.

 

I did have that mod. I am thinking that it had nothing to do with it since it snapped one the complete opposite of the cable.