Instrument rebuild

G'day all,

I rebuilt my instruments today and thought I would pass on the info I found, it may be usefull to somebody.

Firstly the inside of all the instruments on my car was painted a sickly green colour. I matched this to a Dulux enamel called 'FIZZ' (A266). Once painted they looked great, even though I'll never see it once they're assembled, but i guess it will reflect the light as it was supposed to. The backs of the metal inserts for the speedo and the idiot lights was also in 'FIZZ' as was the outside of the speedo head.

Front of the inserts was matt black.

I decided not to zinc the instrument cases before reassembly as on all the cars I have seen this has corroded or stained quite badly so I sandblasted, primed and simply painted them a semi gloss black.

The glass both for the speedo and the idiot/fuel gauge came up a treat once polished with brasso paste.

The dots on the speedo head were fine so I didn't touch them as was the white paint on the speedo needle. all the gaskets were fine too so they were left alone.

The font for the lettering is called GILL SANS MT (bold) and is size 12 for the words OIL GEN TEMP and FUEL. The E and F are the same font but size 18. I held my old glass up against this and they matched perfectly.

I am having the words laser etched onto the glass and I initially thought that at $20.00 a glass it was quite expensive but then again it will never fade or rub off.

Measurements for the words etc are as follows:

from the LHS of the glass the word OIL is 16mm in. A space of 11mm to GEN and then a space of 9 mm to the LHS of the T in temp. If you are doing this on a computer GEN is 9 spaces to the right of OIL and TEMP is 7 spaces to the right of GEN. All lettering is 8 mm from the bottom of the glass.

hope this helps somebody.

Nige