Vintage Tach Collectors Show and Tell

Garage sale find years ago........

 

The original post Stahl tach is the tach that later became the early Moroso,both of which were made by Jones-Motrola or Jones instruments,Jones tachs were heavily used in all sorts of race cars in the 60's and 70's,Nascar ,Trans-Am,Can-Am,Indy,and Grand Prix type cars,some of these tachs have a telltale feature that requires a key to reset it,all the ones I've seen were cable drive but I wouldn't be surprised if they made electric ones too.Based on the one labeled Orient Express it looks like maybe they were used on motorcycles too,unless that one was for one of those Honda engined F-1 cars.They were pretty much the pinnacle for cable driven tachs.

 

For those with a SW 760 tach, this might be of interest:

https://accutach.com/sw-760-series-tachs

 

Purchased this interesting thing last week. Still waiting for delivery.

 

Thanks for sharing - have a few early ones like a 1955 Studebaker and a 1956 Fury - both not a running stage yet - or should say street ready.

 

My 2 cents worth. The chrome faced tach is a Stewart Warner mechanical tach from an automatic test tube stirrer, the black panel mount tach is a Waltham Clock tach from a centrifuge. The SW goes to 10,000 rpm, the Waltham goes to 6,000. I got them from equipment that was being scrapped from one of the labs in the building I worked in a few years ago. I have spun them with a test motor and used a strobe tach to check their accuracy, and they are both within 50 or so rpm of the strobe tach, which is a lab grade instrument.

The 3rd picture is the drive base I ammaking from an old Mallory Double Life tach drive distributor and a broken Vertex mag drive.

The one thing I don't know is does the tach drive in the distributor take the output back to engine rpm instead of distributor rpm, i.e. does the drive double the distributor shaft speed. Oh well if not I'll drive one from the nose of the crank...

 

Here's an odd one....never saw another. Date coded February, 1951.

 

With the exception of the angle drive attachment on the back, it looks just like the SW tach I posted just above. Any idea what it was used in?

 

What I meant when I said that mine was a bit odd was that all of the mechanical tachs I've seen with the Wings logo in the 1948 -1954 production range fit in a 3-3/8" hole, not a 3-1/8" hole (like the one I have pictured). Also, the cup, bezel & pointer are of an earlier 1930's/1940's style, not the "new" front mount style of the gauges Stewart-Warner started to make in 1948.

Your tachs were most likely for industry (esp. the one with the black bezel), but there's no real reason that they could not be used in a car. The face pics are a little blurry....is the one with the chrome bezel 100 rpms, 1,000 rpms or 10,000 rpms? Of course, like you said, it's important to know what the drive ratio is to establish where they could be hooked up to so that they could be accurate. Are there any little plates on the sides with the ratio? 1:1 or 2:1?

 

Not sure how old these are but pretty sure they were made before my time. Would be curious to hear if they were considered of decent quality or not. Made locally in Md so found that kind of neat. All 8k,1 has a 4cyl sender on the back. The chrome cups have some rash on em as do the column mount brackets.

 

Several years ago I was at a swap meet with a friend when I spotted an NOS Airguide tachometer in its original box. It even came with the controller box. He had just got his 52 Chevy mild custom on the road and I thought this tach would look perfect in his car and suggested to him that he buy it. After talking to the owner and negotiating a price, it was his.

The next day he installed it and it looked even cooler on his steering column. I always kinda wanted one since that weekend. This past weekend the two of us were at a swap meet. I looked down and there is an Airguide tach with a controller box. Needless to say, I wasn't leaving without it.

 

I’m thinkin this was on some type of diesel . Maybe a locomotive

 

Man I'm bad at keeping track of the threads that interest me. Just saw your response.

The SW tachometer reads 100, but on a test motor and using the strobe tachometer to check it out, when its reading 100 it's actually 10,000 rpm.

Similarly the Waltham tachometer reads to 60, but is really 6000 rpm. Now the SW came out of a test tube stirrer and had a gear train to stir 6 at a time and had a huge step down in the gearing. The centrifuge went to 6000 rpm. The lady chemist said it could get quite interesting if something broke inside it when at full speed.

 

I just picked this tach up over the weekend. the cup is just over 2 1/2" and has a very high or low scale. any idea where it was used?

 

It's very cool that these sort of threads have become important archives. If you try to find information concerning certain obscure pieces of early automotive related subjects, you're inevitably linked to the H.A.M.B. It's important that any of information (hopefully) becomes part of this informal data base.

Take this very early Sun tach & sender I stumbled across a while ago. Out of curiosity, I researched the history of the Sun company & found very little information. Although the roots go back bit further, the company (Sun Electric Corp. out of Chicago) that we generally associate with all of the Sun tachometers & gauges was actually incorporated in January of 1946. It does appear that this is THE very first model tachometer & matching sender. From literature that I have, it appears that Sun made this style tach through the mid-1950's, updating the senders. I believe they made 3,500 & 5,000 RPM units to start & later a 6,000 & 7,500 RPM unit. Note that this E-1 sender is taller that the later EB model senders & has a cavity under the orange plate that holds a C flashlight battery. Exactly how the guts differ from the later senders, I do not know. It appears that the hook-ups are basically the same, though.

 

Here is the literature, dated 1956, which includes hook-up instructions.

 

Didn't see this one posted yet.



It's a Mercury Marine 12 volt 6 cylinder piece I found on eBay and have been running on the 216 six in my 50 Chevy truck for several years. The 5,000 rpm scale on it is perfect for a babbitt-bearing Stovebolt. The papers in the box with it have a revision date of 1971 printed in the corner, if I'm remembering correctly, but I don't know how far back this design dates. I later found a vacuum gauge with the same design.

 

My first after market tach I got in 1960 needed a outside box and way too many wires,but at the time,with a outer ring added with MPH marks for high gear,it was also my speed-O. *
The box part failed a year later.
I did make a homemade speed-o cable to spin the stock speedo,but the rear gear I had at the time was way off.
So more years down the road I picked up a Sun Super Tach II,that was great for 10 years,then died. Yees,I know I didn't keep up with having a speed-O or tach well,other things seemed more must have working !!
But by then I had gone from a rear gear 4;10 to 3;08< to my amazment/as it was not planed,that made the stock "A" speed-O read only 1 mile off real speed by GPS check not too long ago !!
Used with my stock 57 Ford 3 speed with what ever tailgear it had stock anyway,aloong with my rear tire size!
By the way,the Sun Tach is still in it's bucket on steering column,even thought it no longer works,but my putting the little red over rev. pointer at 7800 makes me LOL,I run a Ford -Y_block and if ever got there for real,8 rods would be a block behind me !!!!

 

Here is a tach I just sold to a fellow HAMBer. The early '60s Faria tachs are pretty cool!

 

Cool.....the previous owner of my 39 Ford coupe had one of these and brought it out to the swap meet one year and sadly I let it slip away from my hands. Should have spoke up - he would have let me pay him out.

 

A 70s? RAC in my avatar, works well, and a 60s PI (same body as RAC)
Any information on the PI out there?

 

I guess I'll have 2 use this Tach in my Bonneville Street Roadster.....

 

Westach 84C. Cool old tach. Im going to try and see if it will work with a standard tach signal, not a mag.

 

I recently came upon another early 1960's Faria tachometer that I just had to have. However, this one I bought for myself. This past August I bought a '63 Chevy II wagon and although the tachometer that's currently in it is fine....well...I was rather smittin' with this Faria..so I bought it This Spring it's going in the Nova.

The original chrome cups on these tachs are super hard to find and as you can see, this one has it!! It also has the original mounting post. I have the original installation instructions as well. I thinks it's a pretty good score! These are 2 5/8" gauges in chrome cups next to the tach.

It's an 8,000 RPM for an 8 CYL. The guy I purchased it from provided a video of it hooked to a car and working. I bought the MSD Tach Adapter as well.

 

Here's a video of my vintage Sun football tachometer. Over 60 years old and still working great with a little help from some resistors, capacitors, diodes, a couple of transistors, and a circuit board from China.

 

Good job! I don't believe electricity is real (mechanical engineer. Electrical engineers believe in the square root of negative one, which is an imaginary number... Don't ask!)

So resurrecting an older electronic tach to me is FM! And I'm not referring to the radio frequency.

 

Picked up this one today. No info on it

 

Anyone know when these were made?
Picked up at a local swap meet