'49-50 Shoebox instrument cluster questions

I found a decent '49-50 Ford car instrument cluster, thinking about using it in the '30 AV8PU. The speedo turns OK with a drill (haven't tried it real fast, but it turns freely and smoothly).

The entire cluster needs a major cleaning up. It was submerged in floodwaters in the Cedar Rapids flood of 2008. Seriously! But everything looks pretty good except the odometer numbers are skanky and there's surface rust and crud on both the inside/outside of the "cup" that holds the speedo.

Questions:
1. how can I bench-test the gauges?
2. does anyone have an exploded drawing or parts view of the guts of the speedo/odometer? I'd like to take the speedo out of the "cup", for cleanup and paint. Looks like 2 screws take the guts out of the cup. Since I don't know what's in there, I'm worried about getting it back together.
3. any advice, before I dig into this thing?

Thanks!

 

You can remove the two screws and carefully take the guts out of the cup in one piece without anything flying out at you. I have cleaned my 50 speedo gears with warm soapy water and a soft brush. Then blew out with air at a very low pressure. Be carefull to not damage the numbers as they wil rub off fairly easily, especially if they were submerged in water. There are vendors that will rebuild these for you. These clusters are also fairly readily available and not that expensive. You may be better off picking one tht hasn't been submerged.

To bench test to atleast see if the gages work, apply a 6 volt source briefly ( a few seconds) to see if the needles move. This should work on the gas, oil and temp gages as they are resistance type gages. The amp gae is just that, an amp meter. Hook it up to a circuit just like you would an amp meter testing device, by running a wire through the loop in the back of the gage and hooking it up to an exisitng system. When a current is passed through the system, the needle should move one way or the other, depending on the direction of current flow in your test system. This can be either a 6 or 12 volt system, and either a gen or alt system.

Again, this test will only tell you if the gage circuits are still functional, accuracy will be dependant on the vehicle you intsall them on and will need to be checked for accuracy against other gages.

 

I've got one out of a '51 for sale in the Classified section... it was in perfect working condition when I took it out.