How to Remove a Stuck or Broken Speed Sensor

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So the speed sensor in this transmission did not want to come out. There's a few different ways that it should have come out. Normally, if you twist the speed sensor you should be able to kind of get your hands on the bracket that sits somewhere in here, and pull the thing right out of the transmission. That's how it's supposed to work.

In reality, if the truck is old, with a whole lot of miles on it, sometimes these will just get stuck in the transmission, and then you have to fight them. Most of the time you can get a pry bar underneath them, or a flat-tipped screwdriver, and pry them out of the transmission.

Unfortunately, that did not work for us—it just ended up breaking this edge, because this is the edge that you would pry on. So it broke that, and then it broke the entire top off, so then this was left in the transmission. At that point, you're pretty committed to the job, so at that point you have to kind of go with whatever else you have left, which is usually a drill.

So in our case, I drilled three holes in it, and then I basically chopped away at one side of the sensor, and that allowed me to take this, take the two rubber O-rings off, which then released this from the transmission. I just kind of worked it back and forth with a flat-tipped screwdriver, kind of pulling it out of the transmission hole, and eventually it popped right out.

The one thing that you have to be very concerned about, though, when you're drilling, is that you don't drill too far down, because you could easily damage the insides of your transmission, and you also want to make sure that you don't get any sort of debris in your transmission.

Once you do get this out of the transmission, you can clean up the area with usually a file, but you're going to want to put some grease on the file so you don't get any shavings in the transmission. You're definitely going to want to spray out the bolt hole with some brake cleaner or carb cleaner, because the bolt hole is going to be full of debris, most likely from drilling this out.

Once you've cleaned up the whole area, you're going to want to lubricate the transmission hole really well before you put the new sensor in, and then do some kind of dry runs before you push it in and commit to it, to make sure that it's not getting caught on any drill marks that you made in the transmission. Hopefully you didn't make any and the whole thing will just slide right in, but if not, take a file to it with some grease on it, and make sure you don't get any debris in the transmission.

After that, a little oil, little grease to slide the new sensor in, and you'll be back in business, so you have to be really careful if you're going to be doing this sort of thing. Hopefully yours goes smoother than this, but if it doesn't, those are some tips to get you out of trouble.

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