Driving a 1960's car in the modern world (part 2)

Further to my previous post where I demonstrated the installation of a home made MPH to KPH conversion chart within the instrument cluster, a helpful reader, Heinz Hurgen Licorice, emailed me to tell me about what he had done with his car.

Rather than making your own chart, Heinz advised that it is possible to purchase a relatively inexpensive, authentic looking sticker that can be placed over the existing speedometer converting it for you whilst retaining the original dashboard aesthetic.  The advantage of this is that it will give you an illuminated display of your speed as most vehicles of this era have front lit dials instead of the newer back lit type.

Another advantage of this is that by simply peeling of the sticker, you will be able to return the car to its original state.

Unfortunately I do not have a link to a retailer of these products, only a link to an Ebay page so I would be grateful if anyone who reads would be able to provide details of such a place.

This was the first reader response I have received and it was encouraging to receive such useful information from a fellow enthusiast.  I hope more of you will be inspired to get in contact with "tyrobenz" to help share your experiences.

Driving a 1960's car in the modern world

As we all head back to work following the West Australian "WA day" long weekend our road rules are returned to normal.  With every long weekend and public holiday period, double demerits are enforced, meaning driving infringements for speeding, drink driving and the use of a mobile phone at the wheel to name a few, are in-forced with double the consequences.

This makes driving a 1960's classic car with a speedometer in MPH a little more mentally taxing considering Australia changed to the metric system in 1974.

My rubbish mental arithmetic was confirmed not long after my purchase of UGU with the receipt of a speeding infringement where I lost 3 points from driving license as well as a receiving a monetary fine.

For those wishing to know the conversion is 1 mile = 1.609344 kilometres

Wishing to keep my car as original as possible I decided not to swap the cluster for a metric one, instead my solution was a simple but effective quick fix.  

UGU is a floor shift automatic, which means that on the instrument cluster there is a little clear window where the column shift automatic gear selection would otherwise be.

I printed up a conversion chart and stuck it into that window.  It is surprisingly discrete and I very much doubt that anyone looking at the car in a show would even know that it is there.  It's only down side is that it is not illuminated but the numbers seem to stick in your head after a while so it is now only there as a prompt.

I hope this helps:

Kilometres per hour on top,

Miles per hour on the bottom.