Thread: Custom Gauge Cluster

(This is a post from the old forum. I'm xferring all my old posts here)


I've decided that the white-on-black gauges are getting trite and so it's time to change things up a bit. I did this a long time ago with a Laser that I had when I was living in TN. The difference then to now is that I now have a SPARE gauge cluster instead of just the one that's in the car. That helps out a bunch. I don't have to get everything done in one night. I would have done things a lot differently if this weren't an experiment. Well, Here's what I did. The original cluster came from my old black NX. It had 199845 miles on it when I totalled it. I was hoping to make it to 200 before I got the other one. Oh, well.

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f254/badandydakow/gauges.jpg

Disassembly is easy. Everyone who's done it can attest to that. The most difficult part in getting it apart is taking the needles off of the pins in an old gauge cluster. The pins tend to come out of the motors with the needles. I didn't want to completely destroy the original faces because I want to keep a template, so I decided to make my own faces completely. I used an expensive space-age plastic sourced from a surplus of filing equipment....

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f254/badandydakow/donorplastic1.jpg

I love being cheap. Anyway, I really like the blue text and numbers on Volkswagon guages as well as the red needles. So, as a backing for the guage faces, I found some deep blue transparent plastic to super-glue to the back of the clear gauges.

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f254/badandydakow/backlightcolor1.jpg

When I painted the front of the faces, I used paper labels as masking tape/stencils. When I do this in the future, I will use vynyl cut on a plotter so that it will look much better. As I said before, this is only an experiment. I want to see how it looks in the dash before I start investing serious time and money into this. All the numbers and dashes (stencils) were cut by hand with a utility knife (cheaper than an exacto knife)

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f254/badandydakow/tempandfuel1.jpg

What do you think of silver faces? I like them in the spec-V so I thought I'd combine a little bit of that nissan flavor to my Volkswagon coloring and see how the mixture works. Here, by the way, are the red needles. I just shaved the white paint off of the back side of the needles and painted red where the white was. It worked surprisingly well!

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f254/badandydakow/guagehands1.jpg

I'll post again when I get everything installed in the cluster. The speedo and tach are drying now.

Here's what they look like (amateurish). I'll do a writeup on the real deal when I finish it. Remember, this was just to see if the color scheme worked together and to test some theories.

The picture links arent working

i really want to mach my gauges to my alpine head unit. the HU has blue and red lighting. so i figure adding blue LED bulbs will make all of my numbers blue and then i need to make my needles red. how exatly did you do that?

The blue was done with two layers of clear blue plastic behind the gauge faces; which were clear, textured plastic painted using a mask over where the numbers went. I don't recommend this method. I recommend the blue LEDs; one behind each number. The red needles were easy. Find the color of red you want in the paint isle of your local hobby shop and paint the back side of the needle that color after scraping off the white with sand paper. Very easy. To make them glow red, you will need to put a white LED behind the hole where the needle comes out. This is the tricky part. I will get to that when I do it myself. I've been taking measurements and writing up a list of all the parts I will need to buy to get this done. More to come with a much more in-depth write-up as well as a more professional looking final product. As far as the numbers are concerned, I would recommend getting some vynyl custom cut for you gauge faces and using that as a mask while you're painting the face of it. It will come out a LOT better than my x-acto knife method. Again, this was just a trial run. The real deal will be out later. Sorry for all the delays.

Interesting project!

the '?!' speed mark is hilarious

lol sweet

"fun" is the first word that comes to mind

Your cluster is going to crazy off, because you took out the needles. There's a company that sells a reverse kit that will give you the same/similar effect that your looking for.

Good work none the less.

Not really i took the needles off in my old b13 and my mph was only 1mph off.