I know some of you will have seen this before, but I thought I’d post it here before it gets lost when I pull the JA site.
I’d read up a while ago about fitting a hand throttle and decided that this was something I needed as I found the TJ difficult to control on a very light throttle over rough ground.
I visited the local cycle shop and bought a gear change lever (a non-index type i.e. no clicks), a long (tandem) cable, a length of outer tubing for the cable and a brake adjuster. I also needed an 8mm dia. cable terminal from the local motor factors.
Firstly I decided to mount the lever on the gear lever shaft so that I could easily reach it and control the throttle. It will need to be packed with some plastic tube which I found in my garage with all my plumbing bits and pieces. The lever was soon mounted.
Next came the threading of the outer cable down through the side of the rubber gaiter on the gear lever and then I feed it up underneath the vehicle into the engine bay and loosely fixed it in place with some tape.
Next came the fixing of the brake adjuster, for this I drilled a hole into the throttle cable support and used loctite on the washer and nut. On mine, I could have drilled the adjuster support hole in a slightly different position which would have made it easier to get to!
Next came the cutting of the outer cable to a suitable length to fit into the brake adjuster. With this done next came the threading of the inner cable from inside (a word of warning here: I fed my cable all the way through and didn’t realise that the end of the cable had by chance touched the + on the battery! A minute or so later, when I went around the front I touched the cable and burnt myself and I discovered it had burnt a hole in the top of the battery! £75 for a new one!). The inner cable was cut to an approximate length.
I had decided that as a safety measure, I did not want the first part of the new lever’s movement to work the throttle in case it got knocked and the throttle raced away. The lever does not work the throttle lever is until it is vertical. So with the lever set in the vertical position and the brake adjuster set half way along the threads, I fed the cable terminal onto the cable and crimped it into position. I cut off the rest of the cable except for a couple of inches which I wrapped around the throttle lug to prevent the round terminal jumping off. I then started the engine and made final adjustments to the brake adjuster and loctited the lock nut in position cable tied the outer cable into a suitable position and the job was done!
Here are some photos of the job:
The gear lever is in 1st gear in all of these photos.
It’s in this position that the throttle starts to work.
This position is about the maximum you would use off-road
and this is the maximum position, but you really would not use it
These show the route of the cable etc.
