Cleaning and converting your classic car gauges from 6 volts to 12 volts; Shoebox Ford Ep15

foreign [Music] yes so right now that's why i'm walking funny because i got a penicillin shot in my ass is that what you call them hey guys welcome back to another episode of dad mods uh today we're gonna hit you with another one of our little uh tech tip videos um so what we're doing help if we're showing the people what we're doing this is tipped over uh so what we have are 1950 ford gauges this is out of our shoebox build series uh so if you want to see more details on that build go ahead and click the doodad and go to the page and do the stuff and go to the videos because we've got some really good stuff we've done s10 clip on the front of it some cool tail light things some other wiring already yeah all sorts of fun stuff motor swap yep yeah so uh we we don't see a whole lot of videos out there specifically about how to update your gauges so that's what we're doing today we're gonna take the vintage gauges and all of their filthy dirty uh very dim lit glory and we're going to uh update them make them work with 12 volts so thanks for tuning in let's grab some screwdrivers and start opening it up break her down okay so we're gonna talk a little bit about the factory gauges this is out of a 1950 ford custom custom deluxe they're all the same thing uh and what it is these come from a six volt system from the factory the cars are six volt on mine it is a positive ground which sounds a little bit like an oxymoron but that's how these old cars work literally the ground was actually the positive side of the battery so what we're doing is we're updating this to 12 volts with a negative ground so it takes a little bit of changing things on the back side of it but it's still kind of a similar principle a few other little details that we're going to be doing here uh in order to make it work you have to reduce the voltage so we have voltage reducers we're going to wire in there are other versions that you can use they call them like the runts style r-u-n-t-z you can order those through shoe box central i wanted to try these out uh these i got from amazon we can throw a link in the description if you want to try those out and we are updating the lighting inside of it as well because the original ones are six volts and those will burn out very fast if you put 12 volts to them i think the one bulb that we had and god knows how old that thing is burned out after having it turned on for like all of two seconds so um there's a few other little details like there is actually a a little domed piece of plastic or it's like translucent that the bulb actually plugs into um and then the dome covers that and they say that it has some kind of a like glowing effect and it lights up the numbers better donnie and i've tested it it didn't seem like it and even when i was driving this thing at night when it was six volts um i could barely see the gauges so i don't know we're we're ditching that i think we're gonna remove these and then control the brightness through like a rheostat or the actual headlight switch itself so depending on your application you probably have one of those if not you can get a adjuster for incandescence as well as leds so uh that's all the details let's uh let's start by disassembling uh very first thing that we're gonna do is a deep clean on these because it for sure has 70 years worth of schwartz in it so all you need is what do we got donnie 3 8. give me a 3 8 socket to remove the uh the actual gauges the the wiring on the back side of them um and then a flathead screwdriver the lights themselves are just very simple plug-in style just push push in so super simple pop those guys out we'll show you in a little bit how we went about rewiring them to have nice clean updated properly shielded wire unlike the old and i'm sure yours look the same tore up nasty nasty bulbs uh nasty wiring shielding so all right let's start taking her apart so we are going to start with marking the ground side okay and then we will pop the wires off so so goofy there we are so oh wow you can't even see the numbers of how many miles on it so grody this thing is yeah let's see just how gross she's gotten gross all right so we got the um we got this portion of it pretty well cleaned up inside um just using water and a paper towel worked okay we're going to try the like the last step we'll be cleaning up with glass cleaner we'll also have to use something to try and strip some of this over spray paint off that's a long story with a previous owner but i think what we're going to try out because the faces of some of these gauges just water and paper towel isn't quite cutting it one of the contributors of our show is actually a brand called super clean and you'll find these guys in a lot of big stores like walmart um i want to say you can find them at menards i think they're at home depot they're kind of everywhere they're a pretty massive brand well they're a contributor of the show and we're pretty stoked about that because you know their products work pretty amazing so we're going to try cleaning off the face of this with just a little bit of this solution it's a biodegradable like grease cleaner grease cutter degreaser that's the word uh so hopefully that'll work to get this little bit off because it does look like it's kind of greasy so we'll just kind of spray a little bit on the paper towel here we do also have their glass cleaner which we're going to use on the on all the glass on here well it is working on that white for sure crazy how much gunk gets in these things [Music] so all right now that we've got this thing pretty well cleaned up experimenting with light bulbs to decide what we're going to do with turn signals and stuff so uh these things have this weird diffuser in them supposedly what this is for is to it emits like almost like black lights a black light type effect because apparently there's some kind of paint that's used on the numbers in here that causes them to like light up kind of like uh fluorescent yellow marker does with a black light obviously it it probably didn't work to that extreme because you know when you put a black light on something it's very it pops um so anyway uh i don't think that works a whole lot anymore we've tested this out we've put different lights behind it and barely any lights getting through so and certainly none of these numbers were lighting up anything special so we're going to pop out these diffusers that way we've got the straight bulb going in and it's going to emit the maximum amount of light in there now when all of these bulbs are in there it might be super bright and what we'll do at least in this application we've done the full 12 volt swap on this thing using a speedway harness as well as a speedway column and all of those components work together so that you have a dimmer built into it that just like plugs right in so depending if you've got a headlight switch that has a dimmer effect in it as well you can wire these up to that they might already be wired up to it and then you can dim the lights so that's what we're going to do we're just going to kind of control this by dimming the actual bulbs themselves and that should handle how intense this is but we have turn signals that are going to be going in here and those turn signals go in these areas we're getting leds for those because we bought leds that are pretty directional and they're really bright and they're about the size of these it's going to put the bulb close to the actual turn signal arrows and it's that's going to overpower any of the other light that's coming through around it so you're going to have a very obvious view of a blinking turn signal so you're not going to really be able to miss it that's obviously the purpose of it is to just blank and inform you that your turn signal is on um so um i think we're gonna finish popping these guys out and then we're gonna assemble the gauges again and then we'll show you guys how we went about rewiring these sockets and which bulbs were using for it so you might stab yourself just a warning makes for a good video though because you've got to get a screwdriver under here let me be quentin tarantino for about five minutes there we go once you get one of these tangs bent in then the rest will just kind of fall kind of maybe i don't know what i'm talking about there we go so there we go probably doesn't help how filthy they've gotten [Music] [Music] looks a little better [Music] okay now that we've got those pried out let's talk a little bit about how we're going to rewire these these sockets so a couple of these have already been rewired and i think a pair of them are actually new uh newish because they've got more traditional wiring attached to them and these guys were in the turn signal section turn signal pockets on this thing so what i've done is i've gone about rewiring one of these already very simple so this is what's working for me the biggest thing is to keep everything shielded but what i do is i am disassembling them and in most cases the contact is still in really good shape and this wire is actually like really heavy wire so i've actually been soldering to the existing wire so what i do is i strip back all the shielding leave myself just enough of a lead that i can attach some modern wire to some modern copper wire and then i'll solder to that and then i will shrink shrink tube onto that as well so you use all the original components and a tiny tiny bit of the wire but you're eliminating this old decrepit shielding that's on it you can see most of them are actually splitting apart so those are not going to be safe enough to continue using it's kind of amazing that they worked in the first place so rather than trying to locate a bunch of new sockets we're going to just go about doing it this way so i'll show you guys how exactly i'm going to do that right now now what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to link these all together so we're going to start with the um with one with the regular lead on the end of it and that's going to start at the left side right side if you're looking at the front of the gauges uh you can do this in whatever orientation you want but um and what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to link them all together because these are all in the same circuit this is just the lighting circuit for um for these uh these these single bulbs that are going in so figure out your loop size that's about mine a little bit more attach these first then you just want to double check if that's going to work yep it's a decent lead now because we're soldering everything together um you need to have all the connection all the pieces of it figured out here first so remember you've gotta run this in through the back run the wires in through the back of this and then you're gonna connect the wires and solder it [Applause] there we are and we'll just repeat this process [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right guys so we've got the we've got the lighting figured out um we've got indicator bulbs that we're going to move on to here in a moment we also kind of got to plan out how we're going about wiring all of the different circuits here um so we've got quite a few things going on and when you convert these over to 12 volts you need reducers to power all of the all the sensors gauges excuse me sensor gauges these cannot handle 12 volts so what you do is you pick up voltage reducers so in this case we've got these drock brand get on amazon reducers you can also get the runts style which is like it's a simpler looking almost kind of looks like a blade fuse or not blade fuse um kind of like an uh it's like a large blade fuse um see if i've got one handy they almost look like one of these style of fuses um but yeah what they do is they just reduce volts voltage so um in this case i picked these guys up they're um pretty simple pretty cheap i think they're under ten dollars a piece so um check the link there's a link that's going to be in the description to to purchase these um and what i'm gonna do is all of these are going to be located elsewhere they're not actually going to be on the gauges they're going to be like i haven't decided exactly where i'm going to put it but i'm going to build a plate that will hold all of those and that'll sit somewhere else but i want to clean up all the wires going to run to the the um the gauges here and i want the gauge itself to have plugs on it so that you can just simply remove it without leaving a bunch of like you know bunch of the bulbs like hanging or something like that so what i'm going to be doing is putting everything in with uh with weather pack connectors so i don't have one nice like 16 pin or 12 pin whatever this is going to end up being connectors so i got to use a bunch of a bunch of what i have and in this case i've got uh enough three pins but i've got uh one four pin so what i'm gonna do is the gauges are gonna have a pair of three pins and the reason for that is the 12 volt side is actually a six volt side you need to re you need a voltage reduction for powering up these gauges they can't handle six volt because they come off the six volt car so what you got is we've got a six volt reducer meaning that this takes a 12 volts power supply in reduces it to six volts on the other side and each one of these gauges needs its own reducer so right there we know that we've got three connections to these gauges we have three gauges so we're going to have three leads coming into one of these plugs so right there that takes care of one of our three pin connectors the other side is the signal wire from the sensor so we've got three of those so three pin connector then we've got our lighting circuit and then we've got our turn signal indicators and then we really need to run a ground right to the housing it swa itself that's kind of best practice your your dash itself might produce a ground signal might have continuity with the rest of the chassis but in this case i want to have a dedicated uh dedicated ground signal and this harness actually has a dedicated ground right in it that is intended to run to the gauges um from what i've gathered from it that's assuming that you've got a more modern um a more modern gauge setup where you don't necessarily have the type that ground straight to the housing itself like we do so what i'll do is i'll just run that ground wire right to one of these screws and that will provide the ground signal because these housings basically explain this a little better so the lead coming off is your 12 volts and the housing is actually the ground so if you look at a bulb itself the little nub on the bottom is actually your 12 volts or in this case these are six volt um and then you look at the um sort of the shell of it the body of it and that's actually your um your contact for your head your ground so pretty simple concept um so we'll just run the ground straight to it but anyway so that's four wires so we've got a four wire connector uh you might not have access to weather pack connectors um you might not uh feel comfortable using something like that because you have to do crimping and uh plugging all of it and there it's simple you can buy a kit from amazon or wherever so there are options that you can go to o'reilly's kind of like what we do with the turn signals on this thing you can get kind of they call them builder series wiring pigtails from dorman and then it's just a matter of connecting to the existing wires on them so i keep those as back up and i'm glad that i did because i'm all out of weather pack two pins and those are actually weather packs with leads already on them so anyway here we go we'll just get cracking with this start building our harnesses so let's do this [Music] now if you are restoring your gauges and maintaining your six volts you can actually jumper all of these if you're oh you can jumper them in the same way that we did with the lights but if you're converting it to 12 volts you're going to need a voltage reducer if you use the runt style i've seen people do the voltage reducers right off of these studs so they're all going to kind of run in a similar fashion together [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right guys so here's all of our connections we've got our lights right here runs up into the four pin we've got our two turn signals that run to the four pin and we've got our ground ground is right there as for the other three pins we've got this is the oil sender fuel level and the water temp those run to a three pin then for the other side which is the six volt signal or six volt input that all runs into this three pin so the beauty of it is all the red wires are all 12 volt wires with the exception of the turn signals which use the same wire colors as the chassis side so that'll make it really easy for making sure i pin this thing correctly all of the six volts are are red saying they will be on the uh the car side or rather the um the reducer side so these guys and then these are the same wire collars as the uh the centers the like oil pressure and water temp and all that stuff so ladies and gentlemen that's all of them the one last one that that i haven't touched on is the oil dummy light and i've got to decide how i want to take care of that but that's an incredibly simple thing that is also just a single 12 volt input i'll figure that out a little bit later on i'm not sure that we actually have a wire for that in this harness so i may have to add it but that's simple enough if you guys follow what we've done with all the other lights one more indicator is the same exact thing okay guys uh so gauges turned out awesome they look great we tested them out they look beautiful really excited the uh turn signals are super bright they're actually too bright so i'm gonna have to try and get some kind of a little cover for those i know you can get them uh so i have to do something to dim down those lights um if they're they're straight on to me so that'll be the first step we'll see how blinding it is but uh yeah um looks pretty awesome so let's talk about our voltage reducers uh because this is the next step followed by the final wiring uh car side wiring so we've got drock brand voltage reducers these guys take a 12 volt in ground in and they deliver a six volt out and a ground out the ground i don't know that it's really necessary when we tested it we didn't use it for anything so i'm going to guess it's just a pass-through ground so if this is intended to be in you know if it's like in the wiring in line to go to something they probably figure like the ground going out will go to that component whatever it is in our case we're not going to need to worry about that because the ground is actually the the gauge side the sensor side so all we really need is the six volts coming out the way that we're going to make this work we've got three of these three gauges three voltage reducers and these are going to be mounted elsewhere with leads running to that three pin plug that's then going to deliver deliver the six volts to to each one of the corresponding gauges the reason why this is so uh important is the ratings on these they they say that these are only rated for 3 amps i don't know what's actually being drawn for a gauge so everything that i've read says that you need a voltage reducer for each one of them so that's what we're doing i got a piece of aluminum plate that i'm going to clean up and shape and fit somewhere underneath the car i'm thinking it might go off of the brake pedal um bracket the large bracket that has the hanging pedal it's this nice kind of open spot so it'll have air movement around it and it shouldn't have any issues with you know being in the way of anything [Music] do so there we go it's definitely a little ugly but uh i'll either relocate it up a little bit higher i'll build some kind of a shield for all of that just to cover it make it look a little cleaner under here but there we go that's her installed now we're going to get plugged in and then organize the wires [Music] not bad [Music] you

Channel: Dad Mods

Views: 17,687

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Id: IDVdK_LSCJY

Length: 40min 40sec (2440 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021