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Old 09-27-2008, 12:01 AM   #1 (permalink)
lyd
It smells funny in here.
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Southern Wisconsin
Posts: 63

GeeOh - '97 Geo Metro Base
90 day: 33.41 mpg (US)
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vac-n-tach... diy custom pod suggestions?

So, I picked up a couple of gauges for the metro today.

3 1/2" tach. (yes, it is too big, but I didn't want to bother with modding the 2" for 3 cyl.)



2" vac.



Not a lot of good places to put them in this car. If I had found a 2" tach that didn't require hacking to work with the G10 I would have put them both on the column, but now that isn't going to work. Well... it would, but it starts to really obscure the OEM panel.

I think I want to go up on the dash with them, to the left of the wheel by the base of the A-pillar.

In the short term I'll industrial velcro the foot of the tach to the dash, and then either velcro the vac guage to the tach on one side and the A-piller on the other, or get a $3 mount for it and velcro that to the dash.

In the long term, I think I have ruled out trying to do anything with an A-pillar pod. (In the longer long term I may in fact chuck the tach out altogether once I get a laptop chassis and decent daylight-viewable LCD installed in the car and hooked up to the OBDII, but that's very many days and several soldering projects away.)

What I'd like to find is either a material or some hackable ready-made whatsit that I could use to fashion a 2-guage pod that would sit in the same location as my temp solution, but enclose the the backsides and generally clean things up a bit.

Anyone tread similar ground before and have suggestions? I don't really want to spend very much more on these gauges, they're intended to get me going right now (well, and I am a sucker for analog gauges --- I just had to have at least a couple! ;-) but it would be nice to make the install look a bit more integrated if I can do it on the cheap.

I'll soon be applying funds and energy toward building the AVR-based instantaneous mpg device and an OBDII/CAN (I know CAN is useless to me with the Geo, but someday I might own a vehicle produced in this century ;-) interface, and then the aforementioned carputer, but in the meantime...

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