Finally finished my V8 tachometer install...

[djawahir]

It's like the truck is faster now, I swear!

I finally got sick of having a bunch of parts littered all over my dining room table. I installed them this morning after about 3 months of wasting time and tinkering.

I have a Vortec 5.3L in my truck and since the truck's been running, I haven't bothered to hook up the tachometer...until now.

I like the look of the stock dash gauges. When I was looking to modify my tach for up to 6k revs, I had two options. The first was to send the original out and have the face plate and internals modified to take a V8 signal with room for more rpms. Too expensive. Then my other option was to find a gauge that was similar to the OEM style.

I found the Autogage 2306. Except the colors were yellow and not orange.

With a handsaw and some acrylic paint, I was able to open up this stand alone unit and repaint the yellow bits in orange to match the FJ60.

Below is the before pic of the Autogage 2306.

 

[djawahir]

Then I bought some lexan material from the local home depot and cut it to fit the space over the original tach location. The 4 drilled holes are to mount this clear cover into the stock tach screw locations.

I know the Autogage has a glass cover on it, but the FJ60 gauges have that "set back" look that I wanted to duplicate with my tachometer. So, I put in the clear lexan and mounted the Autogage behind it.

Just like my sig says, I like to make things harder...

 

[djawahir]

Since I don't have intermediate pics, use your imagination...

The hole in the dash is larger than the 2 1/4" sized tachometer. To fix that, I cut a black rubber ring and mounted it on the lexan and centered in the tachometer location.

I found some elbow brackets, some spacers and longer screws.

I had to grind down some of the screw holes on the back of the dash so that the lexan plate would fit flush in the opening.

Then I screwed it all together.

 

[djawahir]

Side view of the Autogage tach mount. The tach is only held in place by the bottom two elbow brackets. It seems to be pretty sturdy, so I left it that way.

 

[djawahir]

There are 4 wires coming out of the Autogage:

red - IGN
white - Light
black - ground
green - tach signal

I reused the FJ60 tach connector somewhat. The two wires that go to the original FJ60 tach light were hooked up to the white and black wires of the Autogage.

The red wire was connected to the black/yellow wire of the tach connector. That is IGN.

The green wire goes to my DEI 454T that I installed in another thread on this forum:

https://forum.ih8mud.com/60-series-wagons/628690-c-tach-signal-mod-v8-conversions.html

(I could have hooked up the Autogage green tach wire to the black tach signal wire on the FJ60 tach connector, but I couldn't remember where I rerouted that wire after I did my V8 swap...and I didn't feel like ripping out my dash to find it. This time...)

 

[djawahir]

Now for the moment you've all been waiting for...

The glare makes it look like there are streaks in the lexan cover, but it's only the camera...

With everything installed it matches that "set back" look of the other gauges. I swear it looks better in person...

 

[djawahir]

Oh yeah, I also took 1000 grit sandpaper and sanded the dash. Then I spray painted it with Rust-Oleum flat black acrylic paint. It looks great, but I don't know how it will last or how else to protect it from scratches.

The parts that took me the longest were:

masking the gauge for paint
sanding the dash
masking the dash for paint
finding the time to do this around raising my 18 month old boy

 

[Butt Ugly Chuck]

Looks great!

Butt

 

[klinetime574]

Really clean work. Looks good installed.


Gonna share some pictures of the dash? You should

 

[ddnuts]

Looks great. Nice work.

 

[djawahir]

Here's a few pics of the dash in case anyone wants to see what flat black looks like in the gray interior.

 

[srogers]

That looks fantastic - nice work!

 

[norsk]

love it, this goes on the TODO list with my SBC swap as well

dougbert

 

[Big Cruiser Guy]

Super clean. Nice work.

 

[dbleon]

SWEEEET!!

 

[maat]

nice work man, that looks great

 

[rrv333]

Excellent!!!

 

[Forest62]

Just the stuff that I was looking for!! Thank you. I want to see my Vortec move that tach needle. Oh and A/C, I hope we can follow your other thread to get it to work - FINALLY.