cheeeeeap tachometer - harbor freight - $20
 

sure its garbage, but better than a dummy light.

Harbor Freight Tools - Quality Tools at the Lowest Prices

Yea and the $15 vac gauge dont sound too bad either.

Not bad looking i must say

now if they only had a cheap electric speedo I could ditch the cable driven one...just need to find one that matches my signal output, or converts it.

for $20 this worked great, but i damaged my speedo in pursuit of installation. The tach is decent though.

electronic bike speedo that uses a hall effect gate?

the trans has an electric output on the speedo gear, I just need to find out what pulse it runs at, and match it to an electric speedo. I'm a fan of the analog gauge, even though the led display would be easier to implement. I have several EE friends, I'll sit down with one of them and see what we can build to convert the gear signal to what a commercially available gauge (like autometer) would require.

How does this tach know what your engine rpm is? I would like to have a simple tach around the garage that could maybe use an inductive pickup from a plug wire so I can check things like the lawnmower or my moped engine or car engine from in the engine bay.

The tach from Harbor Frt is only for 4, 6, or 8 cyl motors. If you have an O' Riellys around you can get a iEquus tach that uses an inductive pick up wire that is clamped to the coil wire. Just had one put on my 3 cyl Geo Metro yesterday. The cast here was under $75 with tax for a white faed one that has various color bulb covers to change the lighting color at night. Part # 8068 was mine...it was the lowest cost one that would work with 1-12 cylinders.

It looks like the one you linked to is Discontinued.

I switched to GPS for my speedometer a few years ago when the old speedo died in my VW van. It was cheaper than a replacement speedo.