Replacing Honda CB500 speedometer and tachometer face plates

By Richard Backus
Published on October 14, 2009
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The finished gauges on the BikeBandit.com/Motorcycle Classics Project Cafe, complete with custom face plates. Pretty cool, eh?

If you’re old Honda has spent any time in the sun, it’s a pretty good bet the speedometer and tachometer face plates are cracked and faded. Thirty-some odd years out in the elements will do that to a bike. The good news is, you can make those face plates look like new – or give them a personalized look – and it’s not as hard as you think.

Here’s what we started with. Pretty typical, really, and pretty ugly, really.

As part of our BikeBandit.com/Motorcycle Classics Project Café, the 1973 Honda CB500 Four we’ve slowly transformed from a tired dog, ready for the parts bin or the junk yard, into a gleaming, lovely little café for the street, we decided to freshen up the bike’s clocks. We’d never tried disassembling a set of Honda gauges, so we went into this as cold as the next guy. And while it definitely takes a little time and patience, we discovered it’s a project completely in reach of the average guy.

Unfortunately for us, the telling of this tale got let down by technology, or maybe just bad “best practices,” you decide. I documented the entire process, taking pictures of the speedo and tach from start to finish as we worked through, but an unexpected and pretty devastating system failure in my computer resulted in losing just about every pic I took. A few – the ones you see here -survived, but that’s all. Had I backed everything up to a disc, I’d still have all my pics. There’s the “best practices” element. Fortunately, someone else has already documented the job.

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