I'm taking off my dash and I plan on putting in some autometer white faced gauges but I need to know what will work with what and also what I need to do to drive a tachometer.

 

I wanna put in a 160 MPH gauge so I'm assuming I have to get a mechanical one.

 

will the autometer fuel level gauges work with this setup?

 

Here's my speedo drive.

 

and this is the back of my gauge housing.

 

check out what kingtal0n did to his car...nice dash set-up. I'd ask him about his swap

 

i plan on doing the same thing but with a diffrent style of layout. now if your car uses a mechanical speedo and you dont want to convet it then your stuck witht that now with the tach i belive you need a power (or possibly ground), coil, and light wire but the instructions tell you where the wires go. now with fuel you could just use the regluar fuel level wires off your cluster because im sure that it's the right ohm level but you may want to ask on a diffrent section. but it should work fine.

 

Here's mine, not pretty right now cause my original dash was tore up a little when I got it, but I have a new donor one going in this winter, same layout just will look ALOT better. Autometer speedeo will need a new cable as factory one won't "screw" into the Autometer, so you'll have to take the speedo to local parts store and find one that fits it, plus get one the right length-$9
I ran all electrical just for the sake of easy installation, and like noted above the tach just needs power,ground, and coil. I cut into the factory harness to find fuel gauge wire and it works great, as well as the dimmer. I bought a Haynes for the schematics and that helped alot.

 

one more, when I redo it I'm going to put all gauges on regular plug-ins, kinda like factory does, so if one goes bad I'll just unplg and replace.

 

thats the same way i was planning on doing my dash but i'm using carbon fiber auto meters and some cups that angle the gauge twards me. how did you do that? did you just bolt something in front of the original piece or custom make it some how?

 

My dash started out exactly like your, same color and everything, I got a peice of plexiglass and cut it to fit between the vents, then used the cardboard collars that come with the gauges for templates on my layout, then I cut out the holes with my carbite bit in my die grinder, finally I used construction adhesive to glue the plexiglass to the existing dash-it was smoked plexiglass and I should have left it that way cause it did'nt look too bad that way. Once the glue dried I had to cut out the original dash, where the new gauges were going-with the same carbite bit in the die grinder, man I had hot plastic going everywhere.
Then my buddy bought a can of that "texture paint" and told me it'll make the whole dash look like factory- man was he wrong, it turned out like ****/ hence redoing over the winter. I think with the new dash I'll make it out of aluminum (the plexiglass cracked already) and then once the holes are cut out, another buddy of mine owns a vinyl grafics company he does my work trucks so I'm thinking about covering the aluminum with some carbon fiber decals. I too was wanting the angled bezel look but I could only find them for 2 1/16 gauges and all mine are 2 5/8. And actually after I installed them they're easy enough to see already, but for a custom look the tiltes gauges look sweet.

 

What year is your car? All 86+ firebirds used electric speedos.

 

i thought it was 89+ recived the electrical ones.

 

It sure was'nt 86 cause that's what year mine is and if you look at the first pic you can see the cable on the left side hole. As far as aftermarket speedo's you can choose what ever, just look at pricing/pocketbook ratio. The mechanical 5" is only like $120 and the new cable to make it work is $9-a little more labor intensive removing exsisting speedo cable and rerouting new on but cheaper and reads the same. Electrical is trick cause no matter what gear/tire size you choose you can always reset the thing so it reads correctly instead of playing with speedo gears in tranny. But the speedo is $200, plus $62 sending unit. So ultimately pockets play favorite in choosing.

 

Nope, my 86 has a cable driven speedo, So does TomP, and any other bird that has Idiot lights.

 

Interresting. Maybe it was just the non-idiot light cars that got the electric speedo.