Lotus Elan Central

I'm not really sure what you have to do to one of these to get it into this state - possibly firearms and napalm were involved - but here's what I pulled out of my dash a few weeks ago:







Big thanks to Candles for supplying the 'new' (used) part.




Much better eh?

Annoyingly, the speedo cable attachment seems to be different - I hope I don't have to do anything too major to fit this. Worst comes to worst I can swap the speedo over which was the only part of mine that actually worked, but I don't really want to muck around with my good one so much.

Anyway, I guess this is tomorrow's project. It'll be nice to know certain things like how fast I'm going, or whether or not the car is overheating...

- Jay

I'd never have thought of blue dials, but aren't they classy?

And if you did the FunBoy Three as well....

My concern with white dials is that the heater and other switches don't go with them, blue might tone better, yet still look a bit 'modern'.

Does Candles supply these generally, or did he just happen to have.....

Do show us them 'in situ' and let us know how they are to read....

I would guess these are lockwood replacements available lots of different colours

try this

http://www.dcp-shop.co.uk/buy-car-acces ... 572cb4e453

A nice cheap set of dials for the circling vultures perhaps.

And are those high heel scratches?

Gee,

Yes you guessed right. A few years ago when people went for the white, I spotted the blue and went for that. The do look nice as they are a little more 'understated' than white and 'set-off' the colour theme if you have a blue car!

Jay,

Glad you got them safely. I can't think of a speedo fix easier than swapping the mechanisms. Swapping the cable will be quite hard, but not impossible. Is there no way you could change the cable ends? Could I have the mileage off my old ones as I forgot to write it down!

Jacko,
No I'm not in business! These are my old ones.

Thanks, Candles.

what's the story with the female end of the speedo cable then? are there 2 types on the Elan or did you swap it cause the speedo unit was from another car model?

Candles wrote:Glad you got them safely. I can't think of a speedo fix easier than swapping the mechanisms. Swapping the cable will be quite hard, but not impossible. Is there no way you could change the cable ends? Could I have the mileage off my old ones as I forgot to write it down!

Sure, it's reading 123686 mi. As for the cable attachment, I'll have a better look at it later on today... It almost looks like they could be compatible. Of course I forgot to grab the two clusters when I left for work this morning so I don't have them here (all my tools are in my office.)

Do the fittings on the cable itself detach? That would make this easy.

Heh, I was going to try and source the original red-on-black faces to go in there eventually but the blues have grown on me after seeing them in real. I never did like the whites much. My long- (long- long- long-) term plans include dying the interior completely black and having the car resprayed in something not-red so I think I'll just keep the blues in.

- J

Okay, it's sort-of in (and that was the biggest PITA job I've ever done on any car ever in the whole history of the universe, er, ever.) My speedo cable mated right up with the new attachment so no problems there. Sure is nice to have a full working set of instruments.

HOWEVER... I couldn't figure out how to get it to stay in place using the brackets on the bottom. Do you just put a washer in the dash and screw through the little clips on the bezel or what? I think I might be missing some pieces here.

(The old one was just sitting in there which is part of the reason it came out in the first place.)

- J