C3 Corvette Gauge Cluster - Flying On Instruments

With hundreds of gauge styles available, choosing the right ones for your car can be difficult. We simply picked up the Summit Racing Equipment catalog and compared different brands and styles until we found the right combo.

To help brighten up our Stingray's dark cockpit, we chose Auto Meter's Pro-Comp 2 5/8-in (diameter) Ultra-Lite line with brushed-aluminum faces. These gauges offer full-sweep accuracy and are easy to read, thanks to their black markings and bright orange pointers.

The Auto Meter 5-in Ultra-Lite mechanical speedometer is precise to 200 mph and features a trip odometer as well.

The electronic tach will be far more accurate and responsive than the original cable-driven unit, and it even boasts a maximum-rpm recall feature. All of these instruments come with complete wiring and installation hardware.

Installing aftermarket instruments in the dash of a C3 requires some serious disassembly. As much as we hated to, we began by removing our way-cool aftermarket 8-track stereo, which will be replaced by a more modern unit.

The C3 dash is composed of an upper pad, a center section, and right and left lower pads, all of which support each other. We needed to replace our lower passenger-side pad, so we began removing the dash on that side of the vehicle.

The factory instrument cluster is held in with Phillips screws. Once removed from the dash, the wiring simply unplugs from the back of the panel. Don't worry about where the wires go: we won't use many of them with our new instruments.

The driver-side dash can be removed after disconnecting the speedometer and tachometer cables, headlight switch, and associated wiring.

We'll start here, removing the factory tach and speedo to fabricate panels for our new Auto Meter replacements.

Using some polycarbonate panel, we traced the shape of the factory bezel onto the panel and used a jigsaw to cut it out.

Using cardboard from the package the new instrument came in, we then centered the hole for the new tach and speedo and cut them out as well. The back side of the polycarbonate was then painted for a shiny, black face.

The new Auto Meter speedo and tach can now be placed in the newly fabricated panels and attached using the supplied hardware. We also installed the gauge lights at this point and wired them together for easy connection later.

The driver-side dash can now be reinstalled, the speedometer cable hooked up, and the wiring connected. Both the right and left lower dash pads must be in place in order to accurately measure the center panel.

Our passenger-side dash was pretty worn and flimsy, so rather than attempting a repair, we simply ordered a new lower dash pad and map pocket from Corvette Central. The new parts bolt right in place of the originals and look far better than our factory pieces.

The size of our new 2 5/8-in engine instruments required us to fabricate a new panel. We started by installing the new radio bezel and measured from there.