Not to high jack the thread, but the more critical issue is you are lending your westy to someone who has never driven a vanagon before, AND letting her take it to Burning Man?  LOL!

She must be very good looking, really smart, & a great friend or ?

Having the tach work for BM is the least of your issues-You need to Playaproof the westy 1st.

YMMV,

Mr. BZ-wish I was going again
Showerman

On Aug 16, 2011, at 1:53 PM, Steve Williams wrote:

> I still need that foil.  A lister emailed me he might be able to find
> one.  If you can, I'm still in the market, thanks!
> 
> Here's the rest of the story:
> 
> Van Cafe replaced my leaking master brake cylinder.  When I arrived
> to pick up the Westy, they apologized: Bringing the van around for
> me, they noticed the tach wasn't working.
> 
> There was an old, badly-done repair to the foil at the tach
> plug.  They had disturbed that repair in removing the cluster for the
> brake cylinder R&R.  (They offered to give me some consideration for
> the trouble, but I declined.  It's not their fault the old repair was
> so crappy.)
> 
> They hunted around for a serviceable foil, but no luck.
> 
> They showed me the problem and said they have a guy that can repair
> the foils, but he's only around on Fridays.  I was hoping to be in
> L.A. by today.
> 
> I'm pretty handy with a soldering iron, so I asked if I could camp in
> a shady spot behind their shop and try to fix it myself.  I always
> travel with my butane soldering iron, lots of electrical tools,
> several kinds of wire, and so on.
> 
> Why not just leave it until I can find a foil?  A friend is taking my
> Westy to Burning Man in ten days or so.  She hasn't driven a Vanagon
> before, so I think it's important to have the tack working for her, if I can.
> 
> I spent four hours yesterday afternoon trying one thing after another
> to tack the foil traces to the plug, without luck.  The foils just
> kept breaking, or the mylar melted and the traces shorted.
> 
> I stayed with family overnight, and this morning returned to Van Cafe
> to try again.  In the end, I was able to strip the mylar back,
> freeing half an inch of each trace, and tack-solder some thin wire to
> the traces.  I secured the wires to the tach case as best I could
> with strips of gaffer tape.  It doesn't take much flexing to break
> those traces.
> 
> Then I took the pins out of the connector, trimmed the remaining
> mylar, scraped them up good so they'd take solder, and tack-soldered
> the other ends of the wires to the pins.  Put the pins back into the
> plug, plugged it in, then secured the wires with more gaffer tape.
> 
> We stuck the cluster in the dash, and it worked.  Amazing.  But it
> was six hours of painstaking work.  Now that I've done it, it'd
> probably take three hours, especially using much finer wire than I had with me.
> 
> But there's no way it'll work for long.  Gaffer tape isn't
> structural.  As hard as I tried, I couldn't completely immobilize the
> wires.  Anyway, vibration can easily break the traces, I think.
> 
> So I really need that foil.  But for now, it's working.