tach question

my 90 xj does not have a tach installed, but with all the work ive been doing on the engine lately i feel like i really need to know where my rpm's are at.

not looking for anything huge or anything with a shift light, just something that will give me the info i need when i need it.

at autozone today when i was picking up a new headgasket, i asked about tachometers and how difficult they were to install. i was told the hardest part would be fishing the line through the firewall. looked around at some small sun-pro gauges and found one for 30 bucks. anybody have any experience with these cheapo gauges/tachs in particular? and is it really as easy as he made it seem?

i was thinking on mounting it to the side of the steering column out of the way. any other suggestions for a location?

thanks, guys

There might be a thread around here somewhere on swapping a non "idiot light" cluster into a pre-92/pre-91, not sure though. He's right, the difficult part will definitely be getting the line through the firewall and connected to the axle.

Yes the hardest part is running the wire from the tach to the coil. I have a Sunpro minitach, mounted to the column so that all it blocks is the bottom half of my huge gas guage. The only disadvantage to this tach is that it goes up to 8k so it dosen't give a great deal of precision. This is worth it to me to not spend over a hundred bucks on a tach. It works well.

There are a couple of things you can do. (1) Buy a full gauge cluster, make sure it has a mechanical speedo. (2) Buy a stand alone tach. (3) There is a 5" tach/multi gauge cluster.