Custom gauge faces

[Irv]

About 15-20 years ago, a number of us had custom gauge faces for our cars made by Scott H. I've indirectly shared mine on Facebook a time or two in the context of showing other interior lighting or passing mileage milestones. Scott stopped making these a long time ago though, so I assumed that was the end of that and anyone who wanted them after all these years was at a dead end.

These won't be so affordable like they used to be from Scott, but I found a business that makes fully custom gauge faces to order. They've done these for the '97-98 Lincoln Mark VIII, so that tells me that they're capable of creating a template for low production cars and saving it for future customers to order as well.

Black Cat Custom Automotive - Gauge Faces for all makes and models of cars and trucks - LED Lighting Upgrades

Black Cat Custom Gauge Faces. From white face gauges to an array of pearl colors. We can make your gauge face with own design or logo, make it unique, make it yours. We also offer LED Lighting Upgrades for many makes and models of cars and trucks.

www.blackcatcustom.com

I've never done business with them before, but I'd probably give them a shot if I ever feel the desire to change mine up again. This is so far down my priority list though that it might never happen, but if it does happen, I'll see about creating a template with them and I won't care about the cost. However, any template I create with them might not be all that useful to others considering it'll be for a '97 with SHO 150 MPH speedo and 8K tach and MN12 idiot lights.

 

[Grog6]

I bought some off amazon, and they look similar, but no flames.

 

[Irv]

Looking at the Black Cat project gallery, there are way more possibilities out there for the imagination, but very few ideas translate well in print. Some people's design ideas are truly horrific, tacky, and/or hard to read. I think most people would be better off leaving things looking either stock or maybe OEM+ because they don't understand the importance of readability and contrast.

For instance, a Cavalier owner came up with this design. I can't see shit on this thing. No amount of backlighting will overcome your eyes getting assaulted like that. How fast are you going? Red stripe. How much gas do you have left? Star. Which star? Ah shit.

Scott's most popular designs used either the OEM font or the Bullitt font, and the most popular decoration was flames both as a gel cutout for illumination and as part of the white face itself. I originally attempted to illustrate my own silver ghost flames on white, but I couldn't accomplish what I wanted, so I went with a simple white face instead.

I'd probably still do a white face design today, but maybe go with a daylight design other than flames if I still wanted to experiment with metallic ghost graphics at all. I'd probably do something different for the gel cutout as well, but all of that would stay far away from the numbers.

 

[XR7-4.6]

The biggest issue I had with Scott’s was his lamination surface layer was a little too matte rather than textured on the black gauges. I always dreamed of having the Bullitt/Mach 1 font on a SC gauge cluster but I just didn’t think they were that convincing in person. I never got a chance to make an inquiry before he quit making them but I also wanted the bullet faces with the KP/H inside the MPH so it looked factory but I never saw any examples of such thing.

 

[Irv]

There wasn't much he could have done with the material considering what he was working with back then. They were essentially made with heavy duty card stock, so they naturally looked better in white, while the OEM gauges are plastic. Aside from the finish, the laminate is going to take on the texture properties of the material beneath it.

Printing technology has come a long way since then though. I'm not sure that the texture of the OEM gauges can be replicated without using plastic, but the overall finish would probably be much better with the printing hardware and materials that are available today.

The dual imperial/metric speedo was an option. I found it on a cache of his old site.

BullittGauges

As an aside, I didn't realize that Geocities.ws (a web host unaffiliated with the original GeoCities) ran a GeoCities archive project, but there it is.