Chevy Gauge Cluster Restoration - Good-Looking Needles
| So, here is the gauge cluster we took out of our non-running project truck. And, as we stated in the opening, it would have been nice to know whether the gauges actually worked or not before we restored this sucker, but hey, this kind of stuff is like therapy to us.
| Here is our baby after the conversion and restoration. As you can see, this will be much nicer to look at while driving, and it will allow us to keep track of the R's via the tachometer and manage our mpg with the vacuum gauge.
Truck builders spend a lot of time cleaning and refining the exterior of their rides to impress the masses. Flames and graphics are applied to please the eye of anyone looking from the outside, but what about the driver inside? When you are in your truck cruising around, what do you look at the most? Most likely, it's your instrument cluster. When we talk about old trucks, these can really start to show their age, and no amount of wax will keep the needles from fading. However, when dealing with the '67-'72 C10 pickups, the cluster not only comes apart very easily, but there are even upgrades to be had. Traditionally, these trucks came with a few empty holes in their symmetrical layout that could house a factory tachometer and a vacuum gauge. Now, if you want to just restore what you already have, then you can get only the parts that are too far gone to bring back. If you want all the bells and whistles, you can get those, too, because as we all know, Chevrolet is the king of interchangeability. We wanted to freshen up an instrument cluster for one of our project trucks, so we got on the horn with Stan over at Early Classic Enterprises, provider of all things early Chevy truck, to get a new bezel assembly and all the parts to convert to a tach/vacuum dash. He told us that not only does he sell all the parts separately, but he also has complete instrument clusters available. We ordered up all the pieces it would take to do the conversion and set forth to restore the rest of the cluster ourselves. Looking back, we should have just bought the whole assembly, because we found out the hard way that one of our gauges didn't work. The extra money would have been worth the peace of mind.
