The only dial in the car that is not original is the oil and water gauge. It should be a Jaeger gauge with serial X42638/41, but at sometime in the cars long life, the dial was changed to a Smiths equivalent. The dial therefore did not match the others, it has the wrong shaped bezel and the wrong calibration - i.e. the water temperature is in Fahrenheit and reads to 230 and should be in centigrade and read to 100. I looked everywhere to try and locate and buy the correct dial, but as far as I can tell, the correct gauge was only ever used on the 541 and also only on the 541 and Deluxe cars. From the 541R onwards seperate oil and water gauges were used. Therefore there were only maybe a couple of hundred of these gauges made. |
I found that the gauge used in the MG TD was very similar (but with a blue/green dial face). I decided I would try and see if I could get an MG TD gauge, but have a black dial face printed. I contacted a couple of MG specialists and one, Barry Walker said he could help. As it turns out, it was better than just helping.... he came up with the Holy Grail. Through his contacts he has supplied me the correct Jensen dial - X42638/41 with the correct face and correct bezel.
I can't thank Barry enough for this. I can certainly recommend Barry, his website is http://www.barrywalker.com/