Another thing that has always bothered me while driving this truck is the gauges. Pretty much none of them work. The Voltmeter, and fuel gauges were the only functional stock gauges, and I was using a really cheesy mini tach to gauge both engine speed, and travel speed. The reason I wasn't using the stock tach was that I didn't know which wire it used for its signal, and it was calibrated for a 4cyl and wouldn't be accurate on a V6. I had read on Houlster's web site years ago about how to recalibrate the stock tach, so I decided it was about time to do so.

After removing the gauge cluster, the clear plastic lens, speedo and tach needles and the gauge faces you can see all the internals of the gauge cluster.




Since I wasn't sure what wire signaled the tach to function I removed it from the cluster. It's held in place by 3 screws which also function as electrical contacts. You can see the + and - near the lower 2 holes and the P on the center one. Thats the signal contact, and as luck would have it the contact was actually already labeled on the back of the cluster next to the connector socket. It's a Black wire with a red stripe IIRC. I simply cut that wire from the stock harness and connected it to the tach wire in the Chevy harness.




Now to the calibration. On the upper left corner of the tach is a small potentiometer that adjusts the calibration. It's the little white piece with a philips screwdriver slot in it.



Normally this isn't accessible from outside the cluster making it hard to calibrate. I simply figured out where it was in relation to the housing and drilled a hole in the top of the cluster to access it. now I can adjust it while the cluster is plugged in. I just plugged in the stock cluster, and an aftermarket tach and adjusted until the 2 needles matched.



In the interest of comedy, and since my speedo doesn't actually work I figured I'd have a little fun while I was in there.




The StinkBug is now clean and shiny and ready to rock. I even got it smogged last week so it's fully street legal again.

Dallas