Restoring Your Vintage Gauge Cluster

When you see how much effort, what unique skills are required, the rare old-school processes, and the exacting level of detail that goes into each instrument panel resto.

Some jobs will have a waiting time between 10 and 12 weeks, which is due to the extended time of rehabbing the chromed plastic bezel. If your bezel is in decent shape and you just need the gauges, then eight weeks is more normal. Either way, there is a lot of disassembly, cleaning, diagnosis, repairing, calibrating, lubricating, painting, and reassembly.

When you get your bezel rehabbed, it goes through a major transformation. After being stripped and repaired, they use the original vacuum metalizing process to re-chrome it. This is followed by careful masking and painting of the blacked-out areas, then steady-handed detail painting of the lettering. Transparent plastic lenses are carefully separated from the bezel (they were plastic welded from the factory), cleaned, buffed, polished to like-new, then re-welded to the bezel during final assembly. When you get it back, you absolutely will not believe that it is a 40- or 50-year-old instrument panel.

As for the mechanical operation of the gauges, they disassemble every one of them, acid cleans them, verifies the electrical operation of the bimetallic movement, calibrates them as necessary, re-rivets the restored dial faces in place, cleans, and repaints the pointers, and lubes the switches with dielectric grease and reassembles them. The IP’s circuit board is acid cleaned, checked for continuity, repaired if necessary, and the pins are inspected and replaced if required. In addition to these operations, the speedometer gets extra attention; a new “jewel” is placed in the frame (analogous to the same part used in a hand-made watch), the speed cup gets a magnetic calibration, the pointer is cleaned and airbrushed with new paint, the odometer rolls are inspected, cleaned (and reprinted in many cases), and the speedo dial face is reprinted.

Let us say you are more into doing a perfect chalk-mark restoration. The metal instrument case that houses the gauges can have irreplaceable markings and stamps on the outside, which are often damaged beyond recognition. In those situations, a core in better condition may be required if those markings need to match, otherwise, media blasting to clean the case will permanently obliterate the markings (although the case will work fine).

If you want something unique, such as a distinctive style font, different colors to match your interior, or a different speedometer range, there is an up-charge based on the additional labor for creating the artwork. Printing the dial faces themselves is the same cost as making the stock ones, so the added cost is minimal and easy to justify if you think you want it.

The most eye-opening part of this story is the overwhelming number of small, insignificant parts that make up a vintage factory gauge cluster. Most of these parts are long out of production, or in the case of some switches, are reproduced cheaply—and often inaccurately—overseas. Electrical components such as the voltage limiter are rebuilt to factory specs (upgraded to solid-state circuitry in the case of the voltage limiter), new OE-style bulbs are used, and the external surface of every component is cleaned and/or repainted to look like new.