Thanks for all the replies and support guys!
If my welding shield gas tank wasn't empty I'd be working on another metal sculpture that I've had sitting unfinished on the bench for a while.
Well, leaving the shifter cable install aside for a moment (It's entirely possible I have undiagnosed ADD and it... oh hey, look, a squirrel!). Let's move over to the gauge cluster modifications.
The stock cluster wasn't going to cut it. I now had a VSS signal, not a spinning speedometer cable. The oil pressure didn't receive its signal through a thin copper tube but a wire instead. By this point I had eaten through most of my Suburban funds and could only afford the most necessary instruments. The others would have to wait until later. I had decided years ago to eventually install AutoMeter Phantom series gauges, but apparently forgot and instead ordered from the Ultra-Lite series. They still looked good, so I wasn't upset. Although, if I had had the budget to order a second set then these aluminum faced gauges would have found their way into another of my project vehicles instead.
Here is the 4498 tachometer, as well as the short sweep electric 4437 water temp and 4427 oil pressure gauges:
The old cluster served as my test bed before final mods would be performed on a fresh, new bezel.
You can see that the original speedo needle fell off and I had unhooked the speedometer cable at 95K miles. As it sits right now my Suburban has yet to travel 100,000 miles over its 40 year existence.
This was the back of the cluster before deconstruction:
Look at all the pretty fried circuits! Remember that gas gauge short I mentioned a while back? Seems like it made some friends. This also explained why my dad had installed an aftermarket coolant temperature gauge under the dash years ago.
Here are most of the internals after disassembly:
These were the only parts I'd be reusing:
In case you were wondering, yes, you can remove the aluminum bezel from your Ultra-Lite gauge with enough patience and some small flat bladed screwdrivers. I wanted to see what their appearance would be sitting closer to the instrument cluster bezel, but the two didn't match up at all.
Cutting wheel in the angle grinder? Check. Metal bit in the Dremel? Check. Tin snips? Check.
It took a little patience to make a nice clean, tight fit for the gauges. Eventually everything started to go together without binding.
Lots of grinding later:
And that was just the back plate.
More trimming, cutting, pounding flat and grinding later:
Finally:
Now I just needed to save up an extra $400 and purchase the rest of the gauges. In the meantime a spacer would have to be used on the speedo side of the cluster to let everything sit even. I reasoned that with these basic gauges in place I would at least be able to break the engine in properly.