Fortunately managed to pickup an old smith’s speedo for the massive price of £5 and 2 oil pressure gauges at £1 each. What a barging.
Not knowing if the speedo worked and wanting to change it a little any way I decided I would fit the innards from the speedo that came in the car. This turned out to be a little harder than expected. Firstly I had to use part of the face due to the fact the mile counter is positioned under the centre on the newer dials. Then I realised the numbering did not quite line up.
This helped push me towards what I really wanted to do any way and that is to change the colour of the dial and change the font. After fitting the centre of the newer dial to the smiths and filling any joins I decided on silver. Its a little hard to see the actual colour because of the flash.
I think this will work great as I am planning on having my new dash black with the rails body coloured. The sliver should hopefully break it up a little.
The outer chrome polished up nicely and the black inner edge (just behind the glass) only needed a light sand and a coat of hammerite. Pic below shows the newer innards fitted to the Smiths casing.
I finally decided on a font for the numbering and have managed to line them all up missing all the holes for lights and still sitting in the right places. Just need to get the vinals cut for this during the coming week.
I used the 2 oil pressure gauges to house the petrol gauge and engine temp gauges from the original dash. Again I wanted something different so sprayed the outer frame of the oil pressure gauge silver and positioned the gauges behind these.
The biggest and most complicated job was to fabricate a wiring loom for the new dials. I wanted to replace the old bulbs with LED's. I have therefore users bright white led's to illuminate the dials. 1 in each of the small dials and 3 in the speedo. I have used yellow ones for the indicator lights and a blue for full beams. I then moved the petrol warning light and engine temp warning light to the 2 bottom lights in the speedo replacing them with red led's.
After lots of working out from the printed circuit board on the back of the original dials and loads of soldering I finally created the loom.
Lets just hope it works when wired up to the rest of the car.
Next thing to do is take a trip down the scrappy and see if I can find a decent digital clock to fill the space where the fuel gauge use to go in the smiths dial.
Once i get the vinals cut I will be able to finish fitting everything together and will update this with some finished pics.
