[guudasitgets]

I had a Midget Ya it's hard to get used to all those BIG CARS all around you. Something you want to keep in mind when it comes to close quarter combat, trust me you will loose, so drive careful. The smoke your refering to is just the chemicals burning away in the heat tape, don't worry about that. It will take some time but it will burn away. And I mean it will REALLY take some time, like days. The thing you want to be concerned with is air in the tunnel. There will end up being a lot of heat in there from the exhaust and the tranny (sorry, gearbox it's an English car), the U-joint seals and the nose of the diffrential was never made for that kind of heat so you might have to somehow get some air flowing through there. If you ever pull that exhaust out for repairs of some kind this is something we had to do on Indy Cars wrap the heat tape as you have done, then some casting furnace insulation, it's call Rock Wool. Wrap that around it and then hold that stuff not too tightly with chicken wire fence, be nice if you found any of that in stainless. Then wrap that with aluminium sheet rolled around it. You hold all of that with hose clamps. The reason you don't want to wrap the Rock Wool too tight is it, like any insulation, becomes less effective the less air space there is. Gauges you can go modern or classic looking, I always liked good old Smiths, but , it's your car. The nice thing about gauges now is you can get classic "looking" new gauges. I had all old reliable fully mechanical gauges in both my Metros so you can do it. The water temp you just have to drill out and tap the head for 1/4 inch pipe thread, then an AutoMeter mechanical sending unit will fit.