Restoring the instrument bezel

Greetings Mustang fans...

I'm getting there... rummaging through all the photos and pulling out some of the work in no particular order.

In todays episode I've tackled the instrument bezel.

I marked all the wires and pulled the panel out of the dash.

Here's an interesting bit of Mustang trivia for you... the meters run on 5V.  Mounted on the back of the instrument assembly is the 5V voltage converter.

What a marvelous bit of mechanical engineering. Yes... mechanical. Have a look at this...

What you see here is a bimetallic strip that is wrapped in heater wire.  When the strip is cool, it makes connection and current runs through the heater wire.  Which then heats up and causes the strip to bend and break contact, breaking the circuit, cooling off, making contact, and around we go again.

So basically, this is acting like a buzzer to produce a series of pulses with an average voltage of... you guessed it... around 5V.  Would never work in the digital age, but for the old style magnetic meters it works a treat.

I actually intended to replace the innards of this little guy with a solid state 12V to 5V converter (e.g. - 7805). But there's a problem with doing this... the solid state devices produce exactly 5V whereas the mechanical version is "around" 5V.  The affect is that the meters are all off by a little bit. So you have to use an adjustable regulator to find the best "5V" for the meters.

Anyway, back to the instrument panel... internally, the original was in pretty good shape. Normally the internal light bubbles (used for illuminating the instruments at night) are completely melted. But these were still in one piece (albeit slightly melted), so I decided not to touch them.

Now they actually make LED versions of the 12V light bulbs to avoid the heat that melts the bubbles.  Bit pricey though.

Now this may come as a shock to Mustang owners, but the ammeter is stuft!  The 66 ammeters were very touchy, basically a voltmeter across a piece of wire.  Didn't take much to burn them out and there are probably very few original ones out there.

Funnily enough, the early 65's apparently used induction to power the meter and they were fairly robust.  The story goes that converting it to a voltmeter saved Ford a number of cents in production costs. Anyway, I digress... but there are plenty of stories on the web if you're interested in the history.

I noticed that the needles on the instruments were faded to a light orange, so with some creative masking I gave the needles a new coat of flouro orange paint.

Sweeeet.... eh?  Well, you ain't seen nothin' yet! Now... wait for it...

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Howzat!  These reproduction parts are absolutely brilliant.  A toast to Scott Drake and his amazing team of engineers.  I've got to be careful or this car will be in better shape than when it left the factory.

Thanks Mustang Fans... and stay tuned... I've got over 500 photos to go through...