Classic Looks For A Classic Camaro

Installing a Covan’s Classic 1969 Camaro Instrument Panel That Is Actually Useful With AutoMeter Gauges

Covan’s Classic six-gauge panel comes complete with a wiring harness that will plug into any Auto Meter gauge and into your stock wiring loom. While Covan’s offers assemblies that come complete with six Auto Meter gauges, H&H ordered the Auto Meter gauges separately so that they could hand-pick the functions and controls.

The H&H ’69 Camaro giveaway project continues. So far, the suspension has been modified, the badly rusted body panels replaced, the brakes upgraded, a new fuel tank added and trick billet taillights are part of the final touches. Now we get beyond the exterior and move on to the interior, which also needed work.

When this project was started, H&H quickly learned that the car was not quite as they had expected, as is the case in so many of these deals. You find a car, examine it and then as you get it home and dig deeper into the car, more questions surrounding its condition pop up. You simply have to face the realities of re-doing cars like this one, and you don’t always get what you expect. But knowing this, you prepare and handle each repair as it comes up. The interior of this Camaro, although pretty run-down, was pretty much in its original condition, and as funny as this sounds, that was a problem.

The ’69 Camaro came with very limited information on the dash. Pretty much all you could monitor were speed and fuel level; everything else, including oil pressure, engine operating temperature and electrical system, was monitored by dummy warning lights. That’s not much of a system.

Back in ’69, the average Camaro came with an instrument panel that most people today would find pretty pointless. Aside from the speedometer and fuel gauge, there wasn’t much going on in the way of information. Most functions, such as oil pressure and engine temperature, were monitored by a series of dummy lights, which meant you were pretty far gone by the time they blinked. By then most of the damage had been done. We don’t know what the auto experts at the time were thinking of…maybe saving a nickel. In an effort to fix all that and to update the instrument panel so that it would provide information, H&H turned to Covan’s Classic and AutoMeter gauges. They have created an up-to-date yet nostalgic instrument panel containing all the customary gauges with a look that is right for this project.