I finally finished this project, and I wanted to post a few notes for the benefit of future Googlers. I apologize for the quality of the photos; I used my cell phone which leaves a lot to be desired as a camera.



I started with Julie's excellent instructions for upgrading the Temp and Oil Pressure gauges. In general, this upgrade involves:

1. Purchasing new 2" gauges (one top-needle and the other bottom-needle),
2. Cutting away all of the external housing of the new gauges, leaving the gauge mechanism and needle
3. Gutting the original F1 gauge housing and cutting away as necessary to get the new gauge mechanism to fit
4. Securing the new mechanism in the old housing

That part of the project went pretty much as Julie describes in her instructions.

My project became a little more complicated because I decided that all four of my gauges needed to be upgraded. This would not have been that much more difficult except for the fact that I was not able to find a top-needle, short-sweep, 2" fuel gauge for my 10-78 ohm sending unit. All of the fuel gauges that I could find were bottom-needle.

Since all of the other three gauges are readily available in top or bottom-needle, I decided to move the fuel gauge to the top of the cluster (requiring a bottom-needle gauge), and move the Temp gauge to the bottom. This required the gauge faces to be re-lettered since I was flipping two of the gauges.



I used Avery 18665 clear label stock to create the new gauge lettering. I would have preferred to use rub-on lettering, but that turned out to be impossible to find (I guess rub-on lettering is a casualty of the desktop publishing age). I spent way too much time looking for the right font and creating the artwork for the gauge faces. The good news is that now that I've done it, you shouldn't have to. Send me a private message and I'll be glad to send you the artwork for the gauge faces.



All in all, it came out OK. Here are a few observations:

1. This project is not for the faint-of-heart. It basically requires that you DESTROY your new and your old gauges. However with a little patience there's no reason why anyone shouldn't be able to put humpty-dumpty back together again and make it all work.
2. For the two top-needle gauges (Oil and Temp) I used the inexpensive SunPro gauges. The two bottom-needle gauges (Fuel and Volts) were from Equus. I'm not very happy with the voltmeter; I ordered it online and was not able to tell that the needle design was quite different from the other three gauges. At some point I may go back and replace that gauge.
3. A Dremel was my tool of choice for all the cutting. I used JB Weld to mate the new mechanism to the old cases.
4. Rather than have the trim ring re-chromed (I think someone said that costs about $30), I went the cheap route and used the Chrome paint. Not that much of the trim ring shows once it's installed, and I concluded that it wasn't worth the $30 to me.

I want to thank Julie and all the others who previously posted about the gauge retrofit; without them I wouldn't have thought of this as an option.

Good Luck!

-DV

 

Well it looks like you are having a ball! I'm glad the gauge conversion pictures worked for you.

Just a quick question, and you may have answered this before, but why didn't you just use the stock ammeter as is and the stock gas guage with a voltage reducer?

 

Julie,

Once I got the gauge cluster apart, I realized that all four gauges needed to be replaced. One of the needles actually fell out on the floor when I opened it up. They're almost 60 years old after all (not that 60 is old for a person!). I'm going to drive my truck as a daily driver, and I didn't want to worry about the gauges.

Having said all that, replacing the Oil, Temp, and Amp gauges would be very straight forward. If you used all SunPro gauges (two bottom needle and one top-needle), it would be a piece-of-cake. The fuel gauge is the one that created all the extra work.

Thanks again for your excellent document... that part of the conversion went pretty much as you said.

-DV

 

Would you post some picture of the final product? I would like see how they turned out.

 

The pictures above are the final product. Sorry for the poor quality... they were taken with my cell phone.

-DV

 

Here's mine - looks just like the stock gauges, huh? The giveaway is that on the stock gauges, the default (or power off) position of the needle on the oli pressure was at "0" and on the temp gauge was on "H" (hot). They did this so if there was an electrical malfunction to the gauges, the gauges would read worst case indication (instead of all ok) and the driver would be alerted that there was "some kind" of problem - enough to stop the engine.

One nice thing abotu the mechanical temp gauge is it reads the actual engine temp - whether the ignition is on or not - all the time. So you can see how much your engine has heated up when it's been parked for a few minutes.

 

Nice pic Julie! Do you have information listed somewhere on the forum on how to restore the gauges? I would like to check it out.

 

Yes I do.

I have about 10 photo galleries and one of them is a series of pictures on how to do this conversion. I can't get into them any more because my MS Vista has a security problem with that part of the site. But you can probably get into it....It's labelled "Gauge Conversions" (pretty sharp name huh?)

If you can't, send me an e-mail and I'll send you the pictures and a short write up back.

 

Julie,
I found the thread. Thanks for all you do!

Fred