Can someone give me some history on the blue face SW gauges. I have heard them called "Twin Blue" and "Custom Face". I did a search and found the swinging needles thread. Looks like a few people collect gauges, so I thought maybe someone will know when they were produced and for how long. A old friend of mine has all the small ones temp, fuel, amps, oil, but no speedo or tach. He told me he bought them at a speed shop in either 60 or 61.
Many of those were used in marine applications. Finding a speedometer that goes above 60 mph is tough. I think a high revving tach is equally tough. JH
The Ala Cart ran them i belive they just made them for a couple years, but they might be remaking them now
generally, mid to late 60's, i can't be more specific, cause i don't know! i'd love to get all the appropiate literature, sales catalogs etc. but it's almost as spendy as some of the old gauges! yes, tachs and speedos are hard to find. i just spend a few hundred on a nice tach, now i need the matching speedo . also need a pedestal mount greenline tach that ain't $500! BTW, "custom" refers to the greenline gauges from the same era. the greenlines are being repopped by SW, no word on the twin blues yet...
I have some i'm going to run on my fire wall... I know that Roth Used them in the Mysterion.. Mark Moriarty told me about them a while ago and I was hooked.. I need a Oil Pressure and a Vacume gauge if any one has some for sale.
as far as i can tell, you only see them on boats or high end show cars of the era. i don't recall seeing them on many more ordinary cars in the mags...so that's enough reason for me to want to run them! of course i wasn't around then either, but my take on it was they were probably spendy, and generally not cool to most hot rod/custom guys...i'm using them on my girlfriends car, it'll end up light blue and silver with lots of flake, colors picked around the gauges....my custom, black and green to coordinate with my greenline gauges. how gay am I? i'd like to see some old price sheets to see what these cost vs. plain ol black face SWs.
got a greenline speedo that came with my 32 body when I bought it. doesn't match anything else I've got but its in pretty good shape. what are they worth??
I personally own Twin Blues with build dates from March '58 through May '66. I was lucky to find a mechanical tach that goes to 5,000, but haven't found my automotive speedo yet. Pitot tube anyone?
I have a '68 S-W catalog and it only shows the "Greenline"gages. (SW calls them "Custom Face" gages) so the blue face and green face gages shown below must have come later. I managed to chase down a set of The Greenline gages for my project shown below
This is an old thread so beat me up for resurrecting it . . . . . . . . OK that's over. I wonder about the story of Ed using SW blue faced gauges on the Mysterion. I never saw the car so am at a disadvantage. There is precious little information about the car save stories from a few old-timers and a handful of fuzzy,low resolution photos. However there is one (only one) photo I know of that shows the dash (see below) and in my humble opinion, those are definitely not blue dials; they are good old racing black and white. Also I have discovered thru MUCH detective work that the dash in the Mysterion is actually an off-the-shelf EELCO die cast aluminum item. I found one on EBAY recently for use in the Mysterion clone I am building and it is identical to the one in this picture. I also have a photo of the Mysterion on a flat-bed trailer behind a red '59 Chevy and it has blackwall Inglewood slicks on the rear. Could it be possible that Ed used Port-A-Walls on the car like I am forced to do to run my new/old Inglewood Pos-A-Tractions?
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