I don't want to break the needles. I just made some homemakde whitefaced guages and want to take off the needle and scratch off the orange paint on the bottom of the needles, how do I get them off?

 

Where the circle or base of the needle is. Grab it with all your fingers and easily, slowly, and patiently pull on it.

 

I take 2 small screwdrivers, put, just a little bit of tape wraped around the tip so not to scratch the paint on the gages. Then with a screwdriver on either side of the needle, twist them, to gently pop them off....

Make sure you mark where they go, Its probably best to start your car get it warm & mark them. nothing worse than worthless gages.

The speedo & tach on some of the cars I have worked on were already marked but not all of them

John

 

I recently did that and was driving around going about 40 when my car read 55. The little pin that the needle sticks on has a stop at 0. At least this is as close to 0 as I can get. So, if you just turn the pin towards 0 until it stops, then put the needle on, you should be fine. Just to make sure, I drove alongside someone and had them tell me how fast they were going. It was very close. Probably within 1 or 2 mph. Do the same for the tach. I did this and it's off by about 100 rpms.

 

Just go here http://members.aol.com/rmacewen1/install.html

 

I just did the same thing…. Make sure that you jot down at least 3 different places where the needle should be. I mean, make a note where the needle is when at rest (almost straight down) where it is at 0 mph, 25mph, etc…

What I learned from trial an error is that you should put the needle at about 15-20 mph, let it drop, and see if it lines up with the “at rest” marking that you made earlier.

And like TZFBird said, have a friend drive next to you at a pre-determined speed and yell to you how fast you are actually going…. Shouldn’t be too hard. It might take a few tries.

If nothing that I have said makes any sense, remember that English isn’t my native tongue…

Good Luck!

/forsete