Bodywork, Paint, Interior, Trim, & Wiring

In the name of market research, I'm wondering if the majority of people would rather keep their stock speedo or change to electronic when dong an engine / gearbox swap?

Thanks for the feedback!

I like the electronic.

Me too. Made it easy to reset to read accurately when I changed tire size.

I'd rather change all the gauges, and install a custom dash. That approach seems especially popular among owners of "Abingdon pillow" dashboards.

I'm another one that likes the electronic gauges, very easy to work with, and seem to be accurate.

I prefer electronic also. It's way easier to route wires compared to routing a speedometer cable. They can be calibrated with a push of a button and best of all there's no bouncing needle due to a sticking cable!

Well I did something a bit different and am very happy with the results. (Pillow dash originally which I stripped, recovered with black leather, and refitted with a glove box and the early, larger gauges.) It turns out that the series-III ('85 or so) Jaguar XJ6 used the same size speedometer. It is not cable driven, but is fitted with a small motor on the back. At the transmission a small generator attaches at the usual location and a couple of wires connects the two. So I bought a used, good condition speedo on ebay and a new sender and installed them. The speedo goes to 140, which puts 70mph at the top of the dial.

The bezel was different so I fitted one from an early MGB speedo. The mounting was also different, a push and twist arrangement which I adopted but without the wavy spring. And of course I had already converted the MGB tach long ago.

It does have the typical needle sweep of the electronic speedos on power-up, and occasionally does not read below 10mph until the car has moved faster than that. I suspect there may be a little stickiness in the internal lubricants. Otherwise it is dead accurate and calibrated in the usual way by changing the gears. I did have to re-cut the threads on the transmission plug-in to match the sender.

Jim

Your speedo drive might not be well suited to this crowd Brian.
We are more interested in modifying our vehicles rather than keeping them stock appearing.
The early british cars in particular lend themselves well to swapping out the round gauges for aftermarket offerings
If I had something with a more unique speedo your product would be a good choice.
Much like my 62 impala ss. 496 BBC with a 6 speed C5 drivetrain and suspension.
I might be contacting you when I get further along.

Live like you mean it.
Fred

I have kept all my stock gauges, Brian. I have also considered swapping them. :)

Beware of aftermarket gauges! I originally put in electronic VDO gauges but the car out accelerated both the tachometer and speedometer. I changed to SpeedHut gauges which solved the problem. Try the original gauges if you can, I suspect mechanical speedometer, at least, will never lag.

How about using a Speedhut Speedbox to drive the mechanical speedometer.

@jjohanski - Well, you could but that would be counter to my desire to have people use Classic Speed! [www.classicautoinnovations.com]

Oh, and we hold the patent for driving a mechanical speedometer via GPS ;-)
(U.S. Patent No. 9,802,487) [patents.google.com]

Smiths makes nice replica speedos and have one that is GPS driven.

I have a modified v8 healey bn6. I used speedhut gauges in order to use the original gauge opening. they have a multitude of color, lighting, faces, bezels and the right sizes for me. also they have a combination gps speedometer with built in fuel gauge that can be adjusted to accommodate the healey fuel gauge sender. they are compact, lightweight and lifetime warranty...

Speedhut makes a nice GPS unit that can be had with almost any face you could want. It also has features that compute 0-60 and 1/4 mile times for you.