This week, we received the photo below of a Bugeye car getting some bodywork done, and much to our dismay, the entire dashboard and beautiful recent wooden steering wheel are still in the car as shown, coated with a special breed of bodyshop dust. Body filter, once sanded and airborne, tends to permeate everything, especially electrical equipment and mechanical Smiths gauges.
Everything can be cleaned, but I worry about the guts of the already finicky horn push, the pull cables that already have more friction than we might like, basically anything that has to move… all this stuff was engineered more than 60 years ago and we’d like to give it all the highest probability of great longevity. Evil permeating dust is not reccomended.
The largest issue here is gauge preservation (and longevity for everything behind the dashboard), all of which is particularly vulnerable to dust intrusion from the normal body shop environment. In the past, we’ve seen tachometers and speedometers absorb this fine dust into their mechanisms and self-destruct in a short period of time. The grit of this dust is just exactly fine enough to get inside the cases and grind the precision mechanisms to pieces.
It is always best to make sure that any time your car goes near a body shop, you remove the entire interior and dashboard and carpet if you can, or cover the cockpit with plastic, or at minimum make sure the gauges are removed.
Removing the speedometer and tachometer is not too difficult to do; the combination water temperature/oil pressure gauge is a little trickier because it is hard-wired to the radiator (or cylinder head in some cases) with a fragile mechanical tube. That gauge is more trouble to remove than it may be worth, so you can bag the combo gauge and leave that in place. Your ignition switch is also sensitive to dust, and we need that to keep working too, so it’s best to remove your dashboard entirely if your car is going to the body shop. Let’s work to keep our switches and gauges working for generations to come!
No matter how much care we put into our gauges, they are still 60 years old. At this stage in their life, gauges are a chronic problem with these cars; we’ve got all kinds of solutions to help you! They are shown below, including our Bugeye GPS speedometer and tachometer. We also have new original style oil pressure/water temperature combination gauges to match the original Bugeye gauge, as shown below.
We’re also excited to announce that we now have the smaller 3.5 inch gauges used in 1968 and later Sprites and Midgets (as well as MGB’s from 1968 Onward)! These are all beautiful gauges and add a little bit of modern reliability to our classic British beauties! Click on the photos below to check them out or see our full catalog here!
