Dash clocks

It was an interesting start to the day. I have a notes page on my phone where I am keeping the mileage and fuelling history of my car. The driving on Friday was pretty simple to calculate, the 100 mile distance between Wolverhampton and Bristol was a nice round number.

However the mileage on the speedo looked wrong, so I double checked it;

• Started from Wolverhampton at 177495
• Arrived at Bristol BP station at 177660, filled up with 12.3 litres
• Got home at 177825.

It doesn't take much to notice that there's a little more mileage being reported there. But the speed was being reported pretty much spot on. I was keeping up with lorries for the most part at 60, and overtaking up to 70 with me keeping up with car traffic. I can certainly check it again once it's registered, by using phone GPS.

And then I got my answer off a Facebook post... it's measuring in Kilometres. It's a Eunos import so the speedo would have been measuring KPH originally. Rather than add a gearbox device to change the ratios, the importer has simply replaced the backing of the speedo. After all, the needle still moves correctly, it's only the number it points to that needs to change. The problem is just changing the speedo means the odometer still measures in Km. It just so happens that 330 km is 205 miles. 

It does also mean the engine has only done 110,000 miles rather than 177,000 km, but then that doesn't really make that much difference. The only thing it does mean is when I put the reset clock button back in, I'll be counting Km rather than miles, so I'll have to adjust my range based on that. Given I worked it out to be 200 miles, that works out to be 320km so I'll use 300 as my 'time to find a petrol station' indicator. 

As a future change I might also look at changing it out for a UK version. Given the rev counter is questionable it might be that I'm swapping that out very soon, I could do the speedo at the same time. I'm not going to get a rev counter on it's own, I'll be buying a full dash. They're around £30 which isn't expensive, I'll just use the speedo while I'm there. I might even find myself a white dial set and replace all four, although some of them seem to have an extra few quid added and it's not really worth spending more on them.