John S's Journal

Yesterday the heater box, today the speedometer removal from a pillow dash. With the installation of a late blue label OD comes the need for a different speedometer so today’s mission was to remove the existing one without leaving too much skin behind. Got the old cable out without too much trouble. Got one knurled nut off with a little more trouble but the last knurled nut was a PITA. Pain in the arm. Several attempts were necessary from every conceivable angle. Persevered and finally got it off and retained most of my skin. That led me to looking into changing the odometer reading to match the original. The newer one from a 74.5 GT had several thousand more miles and the bezel was slightly thicker in appearance. Not deal breakers but I wanted to make it look original.
Read through the Smith’s and Jaeger repair pdf and also the library article, I was a little apprehensive about disassembling the one with the correct gears so ai reached out to the forum to see how doable it was.
From the responses I received, it seemed like it shouldn’t be a problem and after a couple of minutes and no disassembling, I managed to separate the wheels enough to rotate the individual wheels to get a matching odometer reading. Just need to find some o-ring material to replace the fossilized material that fell out of the groove in the back of the bezel and then put hump to dumpty back together and somehow reinstall in the dash.

The only other thing accomplished was to install the original style bonnet liners on the freshly painted underside of the bonnet. Tomorrow I go in search of the o-ring material and some charcoal for the vapor canister that I disassembled.