109 speedo

Ok so I thought I'd clean up the bezels on the speedo and multi guage for the 109. Both of mine are 4in Smiths guages. The bezels look pretty crusty after 52 years.

The first thing I did was twist the bezels off by hand. Not an easy thing on the multi guage. The gasket got destroyed on it but the speedo one came apart ok. Then to the kitchen to clean the glass, I used a razor blade to take off the circle of grunge and old paint overspray. Soap and water did the final cleaning. I had to cut the inner rubber seal from the glass on the multi guage with the razor blade. It was stuck so tight that I chipped little bits of glass off the edge prying it from the housing!

I think I have new gasket and rubber sourced from Palo Alto Speedometer, www.paspeedo.com Next was to wirewheel the bezels outside and in. The outside was easy, doing the inside required a small wheel mounted in my bench drill press. This got things hot! I almost burned my finger a couple of times moving the ring around.

Eventually I got the bezels clean and sprayed them with rust converter and then semi-gloss black paint. I then went to work on the speedo case. It was rusty as well and even though it is out of sight I felt it deserved a spiffing up!

Unable to remove the roll pin holding the reset for the trip meter I had to be careful wirewheeling the back. Once the rust and old paint were removed it was a couple coats of rust converter and then the semi-gloss black.

It was here that I decided to see if I could reset the odometer to zero by running the speedo backwards with my drill. I had an old inner cable and cut about 6in off the drive end and put one end in the drill, the drive end I put in the speedo drive and pulled the trigger! Almost tore my hand off.....the drive wouldn't turn &^%(*#&&#@.

With the paint still drying I carefully took a screw and ground it down to the size of the square drive. With this I could use a screwdriver to put some gentle force in both directions and hopefully free up the drive. I was able to get it to move so I knew it was just gummed up. The next thing I did was spray contact cleaner in the drive, then brake cleaner. The drive was moving but not easily. So I sprayed some graphite lock-ease that I have in it and tried the screw again. This got it to turn better but it was still stiff. So in went the speedo drive attached to the drill, at first it was stiff and bound up. After about 20 seconds and some gentle speed increases it was going full bore at 40mph! I ran up 3/10 of a mile in reverse and it didn't change the odo, but at least it all works!