Manx Club

Drilled holes for gauges in dash. Tach light housing hits wiper linkage. Any way to move bulb housing or tweek linkage? Thought it would be close, but not hit linkage. In Illinois I am required to have electric wipers to pass inspection.

would it be an option to put a dash panel on the front of you dash? you could make it an inch or 1/2 inch thick and that would give you that much room behind.

Is the speedo any narrower? Maybe you could swap their locations. Or is the clearance the same there too?

It looks like you could shorten the tube that the light pushes into a bit so the bulb goes further into the guage.

That's one reason I still have no wipers on my car too. One way you could gain clearance would be to have the gauges installed with a custom made trim ring that fits between the gauge bezel and the dash front. My first thought would be to machine it out of 1/2" aluminum plate, bevel the outer diameter, with the inner diameter matching the gauge body. Another idea was to use lexan or acrylic glass instead of aluminum, painted black or mount a tiny LED inside the clear ring for a night glow effect. I drew up a plan to make a complete wiper mechanism frame out of 3/16" aluminum. The bumps on my Siggy hood are further apart then the pivot shafts on the stock wiper frame. Just enough to have to drill the holes off center by about 1/4". Since the VDO (aftermarket) speedo has been mounted too high and it's way longer than the stock unit, the clearance issues are worse than yours. Searched the junkyards and found a Jetta single wiper unit for the hatchback. It's a single speed smaller motor, but the interesting feature is the linkage geometry. The motion of the linkage indicate that the wiper starts off slow and speeds up to the full swing position. The speed is still fast in the return mode, but the last quarter turn is slowed down gradually until it reaches the park position. I'm going to duplicate this linkage design and mount it on a custom made aluminum frame. The motor will be from a '70 bug and installed on the frame about 8" offset toward the passenger side, with pivot shafts matching the hood locations. Currently, I'm designing the linkage to have the wipers park in the center of the windshield, one slightly above the other, swinging outward as they sweep across the glass. I reached a roadblock in the process when I read a post where someone stated that wipers should be on both surfaces of a buggy's windshield since it rains inside the car too. Good luck on your gauges!

You could shrten the light mounting tube as David mentioned or swap the tach or remove it until the inspection is complete as Joe suggested. Or you might be able to just turn the tach to gain the clearence needed until you can make the needed modifications.

What about rotating the tach until the bulb does not interfere for inspection? You would still have a tach, but it would be a little twisted. If they fail you due to a crooked tach, then they are low lifes. Good Luck

Would it be possible to rotate the tachometer and then realign the face to be level?

I solved the tach clearance problem. Bought a newer VDO tach. I have an older style VDO tach which is longer than newer style which has a different & shorter way of mounting it. The newer has a spin lock which is basically a big plastic nut. See, throwing enough money at a problem sometimes solves problem!!

I read somewhere that the Boeing 747 is SEVERAL tons over its design weight due to shims and extra paint....If you were to machine some aluminum spacers and and black anodize them , I bet it would ad less than a pound and still look that good. Or RainX the window.

If you go to REX Marine they have a gauge bezel that might work for you, http://www.rexmar.com/page83.html