Classic Gauge Restoration

Classic Gauge Restoration Professional restoration of Automotive and industrial Gauges and instrumentation.

Another "quick & Simple" job was this XA Fuel sender and wiper switch from an XP Falcon. Kimble sent them down for me to...
22/04/2026

Another "quick & Simple" job was this XA Fuel sender and wiper switch from an XP Falcon.
Kimble sent them down for me to repair them both. The switch had completely fallen apart internally, so I stripped it apart, cleaned it out, polished up the brass contacts and re-staked and then soldered the switch plate and the shaft back together. Once done I just had to reassemble it. Nice and quick no more than 2 hours.
The fuel sender on the other hand was so badly corroded the float arm was jammed, the float had a massive hole in it and the filter was choked.
I stripped it all apart and acid washed it, sand blasted it, acid washed it again, and then Zinc plated it all. I then made a new contact for it, fitted a new resistance card, a new float and a new filter, Not straight forward as year of being in fuel contaminates the steel thus the double acid and a sandblast. Hopefully the plating will last...

I am still here, I just keep missing my 8am posting deadline.. I have been busy doing loads of various jobs, one that wa...
19/04/2026

I am still here, I just keep missing my 8am posting deadline..
I have been busy doing loads of various jobs, one that was "simple" was this Wilmot & Breeden CALORMETER . Basically it is a temperature gauge.
This one is fitted to a David Brown Tractor and has been on it for close to 100 years. The tractor is getting restored so they sent this to me. I told them "No Promises" as I had never laid eyes on one before.
Then I stripped it I found it was completely flogged out, the shafts were worn nearly 50% through and even the slot that attaches to the Bimetal strip was nearly cut in half.
I took the gear and put it on my lathe and machined the worn end off and then bored the gear out. I then machined up a piece of brass rod and press fitted (and then soldered to make sure it wouldn't move) back through the gear.
I then cut and filed a piece of brass shim and soldered it into the slot and filled it into shape.
I also had to make a couple of bushes in the main 2 supports to help centralise it all back into mesh.
Once all of that ( 8 hours from head scratching to 1st assembly) was done I worked out how to reset and calibrate it.
According to the writing on the lens "when running on vaporising oil the pointer must be in the green sector" .... so the large red portion is actually under optimum temperature, the green is the go zone and then there is a red line to tell you that you have cooked it....

10/03/2026

I haven't posted in a while and some of that is "stage fright" the last post has had over 700,000 views.. them big shoes to follow. So here is one I printed a few weeks ago. Can anyone work out what car its from ??

12/02/2026

A while ago I posted a video of my new Pad printer printing a HK Monaro tacho dial, for me that was a momentous occasion as it proved the whole setup worked... since then I have punxhed out a few sets of HQ GTS gauges, but they are all flat dials and in the past I have screen printed them. Here is my first effort on a dished dial, it's an LC/J Gtr speedo and I am pretty stoked that it has turned out pretty good.

Time flies when your crazy busy. All year I have been focused on finishing a vintage dash, and it's quite possibly the l...
09/02/2026

Time flies when your crazy busy. All year I have been focused on finishing a vintage dash, and it's quite possibly the last one I bother doing unless the owner is willing to pay an hourly rate as you end up soaking so much time into them as everything is a "one off".
Luckily I finished it a few weeks ago so have been hard at it trying to push the "quick " jobs through.
Here are a set of 1959 Porsche 356 gauges that I have just finished, they were in pretty good shape for their age - but everything has its own problems. The speedo and tacho have internal flexible rubber light tubes which over the years become hard and then either shatter or in this case melt, and they melted all over the movements. Also these were 6V from factory so I had to convert the fuel level gauge and oil temp gauges to 12V and make new warning light lenses as they had turned to powder..
The tacho was a problem as the flex light tubes are not available and are shaped like a shoe- light goes in where you slip your foot, and comes out through a hole on the sole below your toes.. but there is not even 5mm between the end of the steel tubes in the case and the back of the dial. I spent 3 days making various "light tubes" but to get the tacho into the housing you actually have to slip the movement in whilst rotating it 90 degrees to align it. I was tearing my hair out so I told George (best Sparky in QLD ) of the dilemma and said my last option would be to fit LED's with a pigtail coming out of the original light tubes on the case. He said "sure no problems" so now they work and these is ZERO light bleed from either warning light or from the illumination (which is a common problem for these tachos...)
The cases were fairly rusty so I sand blasted them and Zinc plate the cases, brackets, tripmeter reset k**b and all the screws & nuts etc. Luckily the owner imported a set of new bezels from Germany, so when the gauges were finished all I had to do was polish the lenses and roll new bezels on.

31/12/2025

Last post for the year. It has been a hard year, with some hard losses.
I want to thank the 99.9% of customers (and friends) who have had my back and been patient and understanding as the work has been banked up , I am getting caught up, learning heaps on my new printer -each year I want to improve the quality of the work I do and this will be a game changer.
So thanks to you all, I hope you and all your families stay safe and have fun and see you all next year.

24/12/2025

Merry Christmas everyone, stay safe and have fun.

23/11/2025

Im not sure what normal people are doing on a sunny Sunday afternoon, but I am working on a pair of HK Monaro dashs and right now am printing the tacho dials. This is the 2nd stage. The 1st being paint the dial black. The 3rd stage is printing the red for the "redlines". Problem is if you muck up the alignment of the red over the white, you get to strip the dial back to bare metal, prime it, paint it black....
Its all practice and slowly but surely working it out.
So here is a video of the printing machine in action

Ok so this isn't a post about gauges- just a "Count your lucky stars" kind of post. Earlier this year I had the whole...
16/11/2025

Ok so this isn't a post about gauges- just a "Count your lucky stars" kind of post.
Earlier this year I had the whole front suspension & steering rebuilt in my car, I sent it in as there was a SUPER loud squeak from the front drivers side, Ball joints, Struts, tie rods, new lower control arms- the works, not pick and choose, do both sides at once- if one side is shot replace the other as well.
Well when I do it back it was so nervous , it torque steered, it bump steered it was like someone had removed the sway bar..
finally they worked out that somehow the lower ball joints were on the wrong sides and as they are offset 3.5degrees for camber, being on the wrong sides I had 7 degrees - IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.
They swapped them and wheel aligned it (how it passed the 1st alignment gets me) and it was 100% , stable, confident "planted"
All good for the past 5 months, then Saturday took my son on a driving lesson up the Old Pacific HWY to Gosford and then back to Berowra via the M1- the 1st time he has driven 90, 1st time he has been on the motorway, then I drove him down to Berowra waters to start work at 5pm.
THEN I started to drive back down to Berowra waters (awesome driving road, twisty turny, hairpins, rock walls on one side cliffs on the other. ) I heard and felt a knocking so I slowed down and was doing a U-turn to go home and grab another car when BANG, the car pulled right and I had no steering!!
I jumped out of the car and looked at the front wheels which were pointed at each other, the Passenger wheel was beyond full lock and wedged between the disc rotor and the wheel I could see a snapped tie rod end!!! 2 minutes before or after this would have been a major issue....

Here is one for all of the Torana fans. As anyone that reads my posts know, I do a LOT of LH & LX Torana dash's, most of...
04/11/2025

Here is one for all of the Torana fans. As anyone that reads my posts know, I do a LOT of LH & LX Torana dash's, most of them the factory SL/R or SS or Sports dash's some of them my Custom hybrids that look (as close to ) original but with Autometer internals so they are super accurate..
This one was sent in with the request to make the tacho a shift light version, BUT retain the original 7K dial and to hide the shiftlight in the Hand brake light in the bottom of the speedo.
1st up I stripped the dash down and cut up one of my spare "S" model clusters and cut the corner out of it and plastic weld the whole side and rear of the dash as it had been shattered and glued together and now the glues was failing.. I then sand blasted the wiring harness terminals as the lights were all quite corroded. I then scrubbed out the rear case, front lens plate and the wiring harness.
I then sand blasted all the nuts & washers off the quad gauges plus all the external screws and then Zinc plated them.
Whilst that was all drying I overhauled the speedo, made a new voltage regulator and calibrated all of the quad gauges.
The tacho took over 30 hours of experimenting and making templates and figuring out adapters, but eventually I worked out how to make is 1) fit in place & 2) more importantly make it accurate, Now there is a small wiring harness going to a small black box with a k**b , turn the k**b 1 way the shift light comes on lower, turn it the other way the shift light comes on later. (simples) when the IGN is turned OFF the pointer (like all Autometers) will sit where it wants, turn the IGN ON and the pointer shoots to the shift light set point, start the car and the tacho operates as normal. If I do more of these I wont use the Autometer pointer, but rather a factory Torana speedo pointer as that will allow the tacho to spin 360 degrees . Lastly the original lenses were polished and fitted new globes to the illumination and LED's into the illumination.

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Berowra Heights, NSW
2082

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