Speedo / Tach / Gauges: S-W tach harness

[DougHolverson]

Is there anyway to mimic the harness between that hockey-puck sender and the in-dash gauge in the '50s Stewart-Warner tachs? Or are those arcane 12AU6-era connectors all gone?

A couple of longer distributer clips wouldn't be too bad either.

[Dwain G.]

Brent Hagen in Portland rebuilds those. http://www.1956goldenhawk.com/hagen/

[bezhawk]

The wiring in the pins is just soldered in. You can replace the wiring with a three conductor wire from the hardware store. Often you can find an exact match. It is three conductor round black sheathed wire. with green, black, and white insulated wires.

[DougHolverson]

I asked a guy at work who's really into tube radios. He said that the connectors look like Cinch-Johnson or Mallory. Since I couldn't find anything like that by those names on eBay, the wiring may get converted to three-connector Molex.

I was messing around with the huckey-puck dealie. The spring in the top brush has all corroded and crumbled away. Does anybody suggest a good substitute? I have a cut down spring from an ink pen, but I think it's a little bit too stiff and strong and may wear the brushes too fast.

This tach seems like a version 0.0. I'll have send kudos to the guys at Stewart-Warner for coming up with such a weird design and making it work. An oddball electric motor spinning the tach with it's commutator spinning around by the dissy.

[Swifster]

If you have the remains, the are companies (like Rhode Island Wiring) that can remake the harness.

[DougHolverson]

I made a harness and replaced all connectors with Molexes. I ended up getting more involved than I wanted to go by replacing the crumbling wires in the sender and took the lid off the motor and replaced that wire too. Those "transistors" in there are actually big 33Ω resistors.

Anyway, I had a dream where I asked if there is anyway to bench test the tach and got lots of overly complex and contradictory answers. Now I'm going to risk asking in real life, can you bench test this thing? My best guess is to hook it up to a 12V power supply and turn the sender counter-clockwise. I'm guessing that the motor in the tach should inch ahead one armature pole for each turn or half turn of the sender.