Looking to swap my Canadian F-150 with KMH readings to an American MPH cluster (basic 4.2" screen luster for an XLT).

I was hoping to purchase a similar mileage cluster to do the swap. Will I need to program anything via forscan to do the swap or is it plug and play?

 

Unless you can validate that the donor vehicle is 100% the same feature/trim wise, you're going to want to back up your AsBuilt on the old cluster and restore it to the new one. For the 5 minutes it'll take, it's worth it just to do it.

 

Check this guy out. He is a regular poster on here, a forum vendor, a good guy, and has sold many of these to convert Canadian trucks.

https://www.clustersbylivnitup.com/

 

I do these conversions. If you are just changing to MPH all you need is a new speedometer dial for your existing cluster. If you want to upgrade, I source a new or used cluster and program it. Contact me for details.

 

x2

 

Can I do this with an ELM327 cable and forscan, or is more complex than that?

What happens if I buy a cluster with similar mileage and swap it in without backing up or programming - do I risk bricking the old cluster / losing functionality?

 

You can back up/restore AsBuilt with an ELM327 and Forscan. Your risk of just swapping in another cluster is that it is programmed for different features that your truck may or may not have, leading to undesirable behavior or DTCs being set. It won't lock the truck up going down the road or blow up the enginge, but it'll end up being annoying at some point.

Also, don't confuse AsBuilt with mileage programming, those are two separate things.

 

On a side note there are two other places in the ECU that track the mileage. All three should match otherwise the odometer will be flagged as altered. This will be bad if it's less. Livinup will reprogram with the correct mileage to match your truck.