Another, closer to show texture.

 

Nice...I've been in contact with Josh about his gauges. I ended up making a template from plexiglass and will probably sand/paint it.

What did you use for your texture?

and by the way, NICE LED taillights!!!

Tom

 

LED tail lights you say? Am I allowed to threadjack my own thread, if so.. please show and tell..

On the gauge tip, has anyone tried the nordskog gauges yet ?

 

me i am going with the dakota digital stuff and "plug n play" ease..

as far as the LED tails... nice work!!
for those who have not seen them.. any write ups in the future?

 

How do you get a cluster to look like this?.. I know it's not an overlay, and i dont remember who's it is.

 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am without words.. someone please direct me to the thread where this happened!!

 

A site, not thread.

http://thegreatj.cz28.com/

 

No thread involved. I had a spare set of taillights laying around and got a wild hair. It's a big$ job because of the way I made them...that set of lights actually has over 1000 LEDs in it. I pulled the taillight lenses off the housings, laid out a pattern with a magic marker, and proceeded to punch lots and lots of little holes in the lense with my drill press. Then I went to eLED.com and ordered the required numebr of LEDs (and lemme tell you that was NOT cheap.) I stuck the LEDs in the holes, soldered the leads, added the appropriate resistors, and sealed the back of the lense with polyurethane. I put the lenses back on the housings, hooked up the wiring, and stuck blackouts over it all. Voila!!! LED taillights. Total cost was a little under $400.


The bad thing is....I'm going to do it all over again. I picked the wrong LEDs for the turn signals and used too much resistance and ended up with lights that really aren't quite bright enough to be seen in the summer sunlight. So I pulled them back off the car, put my stock set back on, and am about to order a whole new case of LEDs so that I can do it all over with the right parts this time.



FWIW my cardomain site has more and better pics of the car. I haven't updated the cz28 site in months. Also, if you guys had given me the chance, I could have resized the pics.


Oh and I used Duplicolor black aerosol bedliner in 4 thin coats for the gauge panel texture.

 

That's what I thought. How did you make your panel stick out from under the dask cover?

All I have is the cluster...no gauges yet. (see attached)

 

That panel isn't going to mount up like mine did. It uses the stock mounting points which is going to put it farther back into the dash....I actually had to cut a couple inches off the back of the trim plastic in order to put my gauges where I did. I also had to make brackets out of bar aluminum and punch holes in the dash behind the panel to make it all stay in place. All this in the name of keeping the panel vertical and making the install look somewhat stock-ish.

But since I was making the whole rig by hand anyway it wasn't that much more trouble.



I'm working on another panel now to mount three 2-1/16" gauges where the HVAC controls used to be. I'll be using an air/fuel gauge, fuel pressure, and vacuum for now. The vac gauge will be replaced with either N2O press or boost press when I decide which way to go with the car. I had them in a 3-gauge A-pillar pod, but I didn't like the way the Autometer pillar fit so I took it out.

 

That one with the gauges under the hood is wild, I dont think I would do it but it was a cool idea.

 

Hey quadgoat, I just took a look at a pic of your 84. What size rubber do you have on those 15s? Do you like that much meat on those rims?

 

These are mine. They were in the car when I got it, but I think they look fantastic. They're not super bright at night but they're definitely bright enough, the worst itme of day is the time that this picture was taken, darker than that and everything lights up enough with no problem. And they do look great.

I know they're "silver face" gauges, not sure if they're Macewen's or not.


Coming down I-20 in South Carolina.

By the way, I dont condone taking pictures while driving. Not smart.




Edit:

I got some better pics.


And at night


Seems less bright than stock, but at night your eyes adjust and it's not a problem at all. But with the flash off my less than steady hands make it look a lot worse than it is.

 

If you have clear window for your trip and odometer, they were likely one of mine.

 

I found some nice custom face gauges. If interested here is the web site http://www.blackcatcustom.com/ . The guy was real nice to me and it seemed pretty inexpensive.

 

My overlays were made by Scott at http://www.customgaugefaces.com/. The thing that makes them a little different is that I have a 145mph IROC speedo in my 82-84 Firebird cluster. He was able to custom make them exactly the way I wanted them. I had extra tick marks added to the speedo to make it 150mph and changed the tach numbers to RPM x 1000 instead of RPM x 100 (so the tach numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4... instead of 10, 20, 30, 40... which I never liked).

They match my Auto Meter Phantom gauges perfectly.

 

Not bad for making them just using "PAINT" program on my computer



OH YEA!!!!

 

here's mine before i painted the mounting plate black and installed them.... if you do something like this make sure to make a cardboard version first to install so you can see where your gauges will be and to make sure you can see all of them....