thanks for the help guys. i dont think its the distributor, i was reading about that, but the old tach worked fine before the swap...well not sure how accurate it was, but it was believable...
didn't know you could switch out the tach itself, i guess we will do that....we could probably switch out the gear selector lights too...to my knowledge it was only the speedometer that didn't work. we could put just the speedometer in the old cluster, but its kinda nice not having a ABS light that wont go away too.