I have an '87 TA with a digital dash, which I really like, but the tach in it leaves quite a bit to be desired at the track. Honestly, it's fine on the street, but it really doesn't have the granularity (and there's something to be said for watching a sweeping needle for knowing when to shift), but the biggest problem is I'm going to need a higher shift point and once you hit the orange/red there aren't enough points to really know where you're shifting (somehow re-reading this I'm realizing that I'm somewhat failing to explain the problem, but I'm pretty sure that those of you that have some experience with them know what I'm talking about).

I'm looking for ideas:
- how to modify the tach to work better/extend it's range (in the long run I doubt that I'll ever need to shift over 7000rpm (really mid 6xxx range)
- something that I can replace it with that will not look out of place
- something that I can add that will give me the accuracy/range but won't look too out of place

Thoughts?

 

My first thought would be to hide a shift light in the dash vent.

 

I thought about putting an LED style shift light somewhere, but the fact is that it will tell me exactly when to shift, but I'm one of those that really wants to watch the tach and anticipate the shift from that. The tach is more important than the shift light even though the shift light is probably more accurate but I have a tenancy to do things like decide I might want to try another 100rpm on the 1-2 shift only while staging which you can't effectively do with a shift light at that point, you don't have time (and I can give a dozen other reasons why a good tach is more important to me).

As it is, I'm probably going to replace the shift light bulb in the dash with a super bright orange LED and try either figuring out where that's programmed (is that in the '165 bin somewhere?) and/or run some external wiring to it so I can trigger it by an easily adjusted shift light circuit.

 

Is the shift light bulb on the digital dash the empty bulb socket at the bottom on the left hand side of the dash? I was always wondering why they had an empty socket there