10EE Tach Repair: before and after

The tachometer on my 1942 10EE had the glass and hand missing, plus the dial was destroyed, as you can see here:



I spent most of the weekend rebuilding it:



Cal sent me a photo of an original dial, which I digitally cleaned up and then printed to size on paper, which was then glued to the dial plate. The original arbor had a pivot broken completely off, but fortunately, I also dabble in antique clocks and so could remake one. The new "glass" is acrylic. I spent some time buffing out the worst scratches in the bezels. Everything else was cleaned and lubricated. The original hand was white, but I found this red hand from a quartz clock in my box of scrap clock parts and adapted it. I like it better! Very visible.

Just for reference, here are the inside parts of the tach:

Very nice, the red hand does stand out nicely.
The lathe is in good hands.

Hal

focusrsh said:

I spent most of the weekend rebuilding it:

View attachment 263418

Cal sent me a photo of an original dial, which I digitally cleaned up and then printed to size on paper, which was then glued to the dial plate. ...

Click to expand...

It looks great! How durable do you think the printed dial will be? There's a guy in here in Tucson that does photo engraving on metal, if you wanted something like that. He did some very nice replacement round-dials for another PM member several years ago.

Cal

Wow! Really nice job.

Sent from my SM-S320VL using Tapatalk

Looks brand new, great job!

Cal Haines said:

It looks great! How durable do you think the printed dial will be?

Click to expand...

Can't be sure, but with a dab of silicone sealer around the front glass and a good home-made gasket with sealer around the outer bezel, it shouldn't see any leaks. And, of course, nothing touches it. If it ever starts to fade or look bad, all I need to do is print another one and replace it!

You can have a silk screen (now actually polyester) made from a photo. I made a lot of locomotive speedometer and load meter dials that way, but I had the local GE shop paying the bills. There was a period where the GE shop had trouble getting dials from the GE factory for some reason. For a while I even put the GE logo on them until the manager got worried that someone would object, even though they were being made for one of their shops, so I painted it out. Great work on your tach.

Bill

I have been having trouble with my tach. it won't go over 400rpm. i took it apart and found the magnet to be very week. i used a neodymium magnet to strengthen the magnet but no difference. my aluminum flywheel has nothing iron on it. how does the magnet move the all aluminum flywheel? from your pics it looks like there is a wire wrapped around the arm near the inner hub of your flywheel. did you put that wire on there to help the movement of the flywheel? thanks Rich