Thanks synroandy that confirms my thoughts about low pass filters. It's also useful to know about the spikes you get too, which can't be very good for a tachometer with a poor filter circuit.
I've come up with this:
It's basically a 2 pass filter which cleans up the interference of frequencies higher than the LT pulses. The diodes limit the output voltage to between 0 and your battery voltage ~14V which should sort out those nasty spikes to be kinder to the cheap rev counter.
To test it out I've temporarily made it on a breadboard and it results in a completely stable reading from the rev counter.
I just need to transfer the circuit to a bit of vero-board and it's fixed.
Hopefully the circuit may be of use to anyone else with a twitchy rev counter needle. Arguably this circuitry should be inside the rev counter, but I guess you get what you pay for!
My ideas are based partially on syncroandy's and this article:
http://flowcon.us/td/VdoTachometerFix/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;