Gauge Rehab, Check

So with a monsoon outside I decided to check off one of my projects that could be done inside the cool and dry a/c.  My gauges weren't awful but they were all "patina'd" to say the least.  Scratches, dirty cloudy insides, 2 of them had plexi faces where the others had glass and those were all scratched up.  Also my odometer hasn't worked as long as I've owned it and since replacing my gas tank my gas gauge shows full all the time.  Time for some of those pretty faces to be nicer to stare at and actually do their intended function.

I started with the Speedo/Odo.  Carefully took the bezel off as described in the tech articles and with lots of apprehension freed it's guts from the canister.


I found that I had going the [reportedly] most common failure of the Odo, the pot metal gear was spinning on the shaft instead of turning #s.  So I managed to slip it out, crimp it just a bit and put everything back together.  While I was at it I went ahead and reset the clock to the 1,200 miles that my engine rebuild has on it.  I have no clue how many miles are on the car, don't even have any real surety that the odo is the original (did they have 150mph speedos for the '75?) so the figure on the odo might as well have a correlation to SOMETHING.



After cleaning up my speedo, repainting the inside ring/glass holder and replacing the scratched plexi with a new glass face I reinstalled the original bezel, carefully reseating everything and using a small punch to bend back down that bezel.  Looked pretty good.  I'd bought new aluminum bezels from Rennline simply because they were purty intending to add them to all the newness.  The instructions have you simply place this lovely jewelry over the stock bezels attaching them with some thin double sided tape.  That didn't so much work for me, there's a big visual gap between the glass and the aluminum bezel that I knew was going to drive me bonkers.

I tested out and the new bezels would happily replace the stock black ones with a bit of engineering to attach them and be flush with the glass.  I went ahead and took the other 4 gauges fully apart, cleaned them all up, replaced the glass in the tach and then reassembled them attaching the new bezels to the cans with clear silicon.  They seem firmly [enough] attached, if they prove me wrong in time I'll up the ante on the gluing but the results are way too beautiful to go back to the original attachment method.



For the record my clock doesn't work, I took it apart as well but didn't really figure out why it does what it does.  The motor spins, it seems to tighten some gear till it does a little pop (that I've heard for years now) but doesn't move the mechanism.  I decided [for now] to let that one go as not really on my give a damn list. I'm excited about knowing how fast I'm going, how far I've traveled and that they all look like they belong in my quickly improving 911 again.