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Were where this lot found, under a bush?

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kent400:
Ash the 500 miler is one that a very poor restoration attempt, the needle pins are bent and the underside of the needles are touching the dial face screws. It's had a dial face overlay and it's torn around the counter aperture. The mileage counter wheels are seized, they are aluminium rather that the later Seiki plastic wheels. Taking those apart is not for the faint hearted.

kent400:
After swapping mechanism, discarding those where the drive spindle housings were worn to excess and freeing off drive spindles what were seized I managed to get three gauges out of the pile. It would seem that excessively worn drive spindle housings are a frequent occurrence, probably caused by vibration and easy to check without dismantling by placing a small screwdriver firmly in the drive cable square.  If it's possible to move the spindle up and down any more than a very small amount there is little that can be done. Fortunately the later design of gauges fitted to the SOHC models don't seem to suffer drive wear housings to the same extent. 

They all have dial face overlays and the red tenth of mile counter drums have been overlaid with a strip of numbers printed on vinyl. Additionally the bases have been re-zinc plated and the needles painted.

The bezels where supplied re-chromed, the are dent-free although they don't look great in the images and I rather wish that whoever removed them had taken a more care while doing it. 

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AshimotoK0:
Looking good, as usual Peter. How much play is acceptable on those mechanisms ... as you have got me worried now ... no point being a hoarder of shiny parts if the parts don't function properly  :). Is there nothing that can be done to fix the excessive  play? My most complicated one is the CB250K0 JDM one, as it has the speed pickup inside it for the Japan market lamp that illuminates above a certain speed.
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kent400:
The movement between the gauge drive spindle and the housing should be hardly discernible. The image on the left shows how much gap the is between the internal magnet and the cover. It's probably  only a millimetre.

The image in the middle shows the magnet that's connected to the drive spindle and the image on the right shows the magnet cover. If there's excess movement in the drive spindle the magnet connected to it will touch the cover that will cause the needle to become erratic and in some cases the needle to go right around the gauge and break the hair spring that controls the calibration.

The magnet is flared onto the drive spindle so removal is possible but subsequently re-securing it successfully would be difficult.  A bush would then need to be fitted in the housing, I would imagine it would be difficult to get the spindle correctly aligned and would require some skill. You can see from the image on the left how the gauge front panel is secured to the frame, four tiny tabs that are part of the main frame and removal requires careful use of a  Dremel. [ Guests cannot view attachments ] This needs to be removed to re-fill the damper or remove anything that's become jammed between the magnet and cover.

Not seen one with an over-speed warning Ash and would be interesting to know how that works

The tacho on these old gauges seem to suffer drive housing wear more the speedo, the only reason for this maybe that engine vibration is transmitted  via the cable to the tacho drive spindle. This does not seem to occur on SOHC bikes but their gauge design is slightly different.   

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