Thanks, Matt
At 03:12 PM 9/29/2003 -0700, you wrote:
Yup... it was a PIA fitting the speedo and tach. Fabbed up some alum brackets on the back and epoxied them to the plastic so the guages would look up at the driver like they should and not at my knees. Used a dremel tool to cut down inner bevel areas and once those were flattened on the backside I cut some flat plastic and cut it so it would go around the gauge and cover the areas not covered by the guage. Expoxied this as well. I had to make a cover for the speedo out of some thin aluminum and painted it black. That hides the ugly siver back of the speedo, but you could just paint the back of the speedo black as well. I actually use the mounting stuff that came with the guages to mount them with some fabbed up brackets, but it takes a lot of finesse and patience. I can get a pic of the back when I get a hold of a camera iagain f you want.
I also made the slant piece for the fuel level guage, but Auto meter actually makes these pieces for the 2 1/16" and 2 5/8" guages... just not the 5". The 2 1/16" coolant guage actually fits in the existing center pod with very minimal work. A large hose clamps works mint to hold the gauge in place. This bezel I got out of a salvage yard for cheap so I of course had to do the screw hole fixes... painted it with Testers black model paint and used one of the alum colored paint pens for the trim. Rest is straight forward... made a plastic panel for on the left and cut some extra out of the radio area to let the gauages fit. Drilled the holes for the switches.
I have probably about 40-50 hours of work into this project... maybe more with mock up and experimenting. If I was to be faced with the same thing...
would get a factory cluster and put it in, use the speedo and gas guage, mount the tach on the dash like everyone else and modify the rest as I did with a lot less work. But now that it is done I'm very happy with it :)
Mikey
From: Matthew Post <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: The Chevelle Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: The Chevelle Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Chevelle-list] 12 bolt advice Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 14:26:31 -0700
very cool Mikey........did you modify that dash bezel yourself? I was thinking about doing the same thing with mine.
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