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 Post subject: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 9:59 am 
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So, my new Smiths speedometer came in from India yesterday. The inverted-sweep needle and old-timey number fonts are perfect.

My wife was admiring it and then said, "why doesn't it have an odometer?"

Oops. Nope, the picture didn't show an odometer either. I hadn't paid any attention.

Strictly speaking we don't need an odometer, but it would be handy for keeping track of usage and maintenance intervals. So I started looking for a standalone odometer.

Ideally I'd like a 2" gauge that matches the Smiths gauges, preferably with a trip meter too. Some googling... nothing showed up. Some digital stuff, which I'm not interested in. I found "mileometer" and "cyclemeter" from the bicycle world, but most of those top at three or four digits and are big boxes. I remembered some old-school rally cars with fancy odometers, but all I could turn up were complicated control panels, mostly digital anyway.

Anyone have any ideas for a 1950s-ish standalone odometer?


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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 11:35 am 
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Oddly enough, this same subject just came up on a vintage motorcycle forum I'm on. It seems as though the mechanical odometer is dead. A quick google search confirmed that, with the exception of units mounted directly to the wheel (as you already know)

What Some ended up doing, was finding a speedometer with odometer that could use their vehicles VSS input, whether mechanical or digital, and simply trimming the whole gauge down to fit into the housing they had selected. Some quick Photoshop work for a gauge face, printed on heavy cardstock and they matched fairly well.

There was wide success with gauges with digital inputs, as opposed to mechanical ones because the assembly used to drive the odometer was much smaller.

There are some companies that make custom gauges, and you may want to check into some of them. Speedhut comes to mind, their gauges are gorgeous and they do a ton of custom faces/ fonts/ gauges. they also offer GPS based speedos/ odometers.

The other option is to find the gauge you want, and have it refaced by someone like adam @ revlimiter. his website is revlimiter.net

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 12:56 pm 
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I would think that the "guts" of the speedo are standard Smith parts. As such, the drive gear for the odometer would be in there. I wonder if one of the speedo repair shops could mount the guts of an odometer and tripmeter to your new Smiths meter. Might be worth an inquiry.

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 1:12 pm 
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Hmm. That's a thought...

Right after I posted the original message I found a fallback alternative - a 2-1/6" speedometer/odometer sold for use on choppers. The bezel is a dead ringer for the Smiths MG bezels the other gauges have. I can pull the needle - I actually have a tool for that! - and paint the face of the gauge semi-flat black to match the other gauges. Then it would be just an odometer.
It was only $15, so if I come up with something better I'll just toss it in the box with the rest of the mismatched gauge collection...

It looks like Smiths had maybe four bezel shapes, in either chrome or black. And fortunately the simple bevel is the most common. The dual oil/water temp gauge is from a '70s MG, the speedo and tach are probably from two different old British motorcycles, and I'm waiting for a good price on an early '60s MG fuel gauge. The bezels and fonts match, close enough anyway.


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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 1:21 pm 
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Quote:
I found a fallback alternative - a 2-1/6" speedometer/odometer sold for use on choppers. The bezel is a dead ringer for the Smiths MG bezels the other gauges have. I can pull the needle - I actually have a tool for that! - and paint the face of the gauge semi-flat black to match the other gauges. Then it would be just an odometer.
So how would you propose to split the speedo cable to drive 2 devices? The Smiths speedo I have seen have the drive ratio printed on the face. Later versions are all 1000:1 I think. Earlier ones were all over the map. Make sure they are both the same or figure a way to "scale" one to the other.

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Last edited by rx7locost on December 18, 2015, 1:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 1:21 pm 
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Location: England
If the odometer or trip are not high on your agenda maybe an hour meter would do. Its pretty much a standard on plant and machinery for an accurate service interval counter.

Bob

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 3:40 pm 
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Commonly referred to as "Hobbs meters."

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 3:47 pm 
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Some jurisdictions may require an odometer for consumer protection use (the EU does, for example). If yours does, and hour-meter won't cut it. But would an inspector bother to check?

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 5:24 pm 
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So far all my gauges are mechanical. The only important gauge I don't have yet is the fuel gauge...

After doing a bunch of research I determined that the Japanese transaxle and Smiths speedometer would require some sort of homemade gearbox, and there would be no practical way to get a mechanical tach output for the Suzuki-made engine. So I decided to go crazy and use Hall Effect sensors to pick up speedo and tach signals and then use an Arduino microcontroller to drive DC motors on the back of the instruments. The software will be just a simple table of values and a comparison loop.

Adding an output for a mechanical odometer would mean just adding another motor and a couple more rows to the comparison table.

That leaves me one gazinta and one gazouta in case I need to adjust the fuel gauge.

It's thermonuclear overkill, but the whole shebang will cost less than one speedometer gear box, last time I priced one...

The oil pressure and water temp plumbing will actually cost more than the microcontroller bits - I've been learning all about metric, British Standard Tapered and British Standard Parallel pipe threads, leather sealing washers on Smiths gauges, and how to cut and splice mechanical temp gauge tubes. So I'm going from weirdball metric to AN to weirdball British threads, and those adapters aren't cheap... some of the pieces showed up in yesterday's mail.


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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 18, 2015, 7:56 pm 
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I'll chime in with my bit of blabber. :P

I know for a fact that the terratrip speedo probe is good, I installed one on my brothers truck to feed the ECU when we did the engine swap. Without it the thing was very ornery...
link to where we bought ours

You can also get a probe from a 2000-era Mitsubishi Montero Sport that will screw into a cable drive, but that doesn't do pass-through. linky

As far as the means to drive the speedometers, I'd go brush-less RC car inrunner motors, with a good 12V brushless ESC. Most use an atmel processor, and there is open-source firmware for them (SimonK) that can be controlled via servo pulse or in some cases I2C.
Or you can roll your own version of the code that samples the VSS directly, and you'll have a small compact setup.

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 19, 2015, 12:02 am 
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That's a great price on the VSS! For some reason GM ones go for twice that, or did a few years ago last time I had to buy one. And they had crummy plastic housings that broke after a few years... GM only used the passthrough sensors for a few years until they went to electronic speedometers.

I was planning to write some magnets to one of the halfshafts and make a bracket for the sensor, but something that screws right onto the transmission's speedo output would be much cleaner-looking.

Fortunately (?) the Geo's ECM doesn't use a speed input, so all the sensor would drive is the Arduino.


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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 19, 2015, 12:08 am 
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I can dig up the wiring diagram for the Mitsu sensor, and try to find it's mating connector pigtail i you want. Part of me says it's the same as the TPS connector on the 90's 2.4L Mitsu engines.

The terratrip one is 5V supply, with an open collector output.
I seem to recall the Mitsu one being 12V supply with open collector output.

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 19, 2015, 1:34 am 
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Like you, I'm using Smiths gauges (mechanical, except for the tach, which is an RVC-type MGB item), and getting them to talk to other, more modern systems is, well, challenging.

One place you might try, if you haven't looked there, is Chris Spiyda's site https://www.spiyda.com/magento/index.php He has designed & built all kinds of electronics wizardry to connect up various British bits to modern bits. I've just purchased one of his tachometer-matching black boxes which, it appears, will allow virtually any electronic tach ever made to be accurately driven from virtually any electric or electronic tach source ever made. He also makes black boxes to make various fuel senders work with a plethora of different gauges.

Worth a look, and the reviews of his products are outstanding. He's also easy to talk to, and happy to help sort out your problems (mine was how to get a 1970's RVC MGB tachometer to talk to a bespoke, modified GM OBD-1 ignition source, while fitted to a Ford Zetec engine!!). He's supremely confident that his solution will work.

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 19, 2015, 4:45 am 
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The older british rev counters will also work off of the alternator. Solder a phase tap onto a wire before the rectifier bridge and then trim using the calibration screw in the back of the rev counter using a timing light to get it accurate or use resistors.

Bob

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 Post subject: Re: standalone odometer
PostPosted: December 19, 2015, 10:55 am 
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300D50 wrote:
I can dig up the wiring diagram for the Mitsu sensor


Please!


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