Spent the night swapping the diesel gauges over to my 62 dash. The important one I needed was the tachometer due to how the diesel reads RPM. On the 62, the tachometer gets the RPM signal from the ignition coil. Since the diesel engine doesn’t have an ignition coil, you have to get the RPM’s from either the alternator, fuel injector lines, or by the factory setup, the flywheel. It uses a Hall effect sensor which is a type of transducer that varies its output voltage to the tachometer in response to a magnetic field. Basically it detects the teeth on the flywheel as they pass the sensor and converts that signal to the dial you see on your dash.
I swapped over the rest of the gauges so the other gauges will work with the engine’s sensors and also to match the style of gauge markings with the tachometer. My 62’s gauge faces had tick markings throughout where as the 60’s gauges had more of a bar style marking.
Something else I wanted to add was a glow plug light. I originally planned to use the check engine light since that indication is useless now. The gauge cluster from the diesel had the factory glow plug light sitting there and I wanted to somehow use that. Unfortunately it wasn’t a direct swap. Two completely different indicators. So I ended up trimming down the lense to sit inside the 60’s lense bulb housing. Then I epoxied that housing to the 62 dash. It’s not perfect, but will do nicely.
Once it’s back in the cruiser I will have to verify the wiring and change some of it to accept the diesel sensors, but that won’t be a huge deal. Just have to not panick when I see the speedometer read 100+, since it now reads KPH.
