I didn't remove the needles on the install,carefully slid the face with the needles going through the center hole. I did trim the speedo needle on the back half to get it to fit through the gauge face in stead of drilling a slightly larger hole in the gauge face. you do have to drill holes through the original gauge face to fit the ribbon wire through the face so your gonna destroy your gauges doing this mod. I also converted my ammeter to a volt meter and used a mini tach from the parts store in this mod.
the only needle that poped off was on the tach. I mounted the cluster with the lens off and hooked my timming light up with tach readout and ran the engine to pop the needle back on in it's correct spot. I got about a 100 bucks in this mod and the result looks awesome.