Need to tap into collective wisdom please
I want to achieve a vintage racer look or perhaps a modern take on vintage racer with the dash.
I am assuming that its a complete non-starter to try and use some of the lovely and cheap dial clusters from modern Mercedes etc? However sourcing
genuine vintage or reproduction dials looks prohibitively expensive.
Are there any donors that are old enough to have the big round dial look and and not be powered by microchips that make them inaccessible. Something
like maybe an old XJ or XJS maybe?
I dont want to spend several hundred on a kit car dial set that i dont really like if i can avoid it.
plenty of cheapish 60/70s dials about. Smiths/jaegar etc from british cars of the era. Or are we talking 40's style?
Be aware electronic tachos we a little rare before the 70's,they were often cable drive from the dizzy.
Don't know how they're driven, but Peugeot 205 GTI dasboards have speedo, tacho, fuel, coolant temp, oil temp and oil pressure gauages.
They're all in a pod so it might take some ingenuity to get them mounted in a visually pleasing way, but there's certainly a good selection
of gauges in them.
Stot on the Haynes forum did some impressive work on his MX5 cluster-turning them upside down and printing new labels to change the look of them - see here: http://forums.haynes.co.uk/showthread.php?t=12492&page=10
Thanks guys - some good options.
What I am not understanding is how do I know which instruments I could use for a Zetec and which ones I wouldn't be able to get working? if I
could make a 205 or MX5 dials work why not some Mercedes AMG ones? If it makes a difference I plane to be using the std ford ecu.
I appreciate that this is probably a stupid question!
I'm thinking the newer the car the gauges come from the more they'll be under some control from the ECU of the donor car. That may make it harder for you to control them achieve accurate readings.
quote:
Originally posted by nick205
I'm thinking the newer the car the gauges come from the more they'll be under some control from the ECU of the donor car. That may make it harder for you to control them achieve accurate readings.