I emailed the guy at cutsmetal.com...I got his name on ebay and I asked him about doing a custom gauges cluster for my truck. If he can do what I want, I am going to get one made in the diamond plated aluminum and try it out. I can grind down the rises in the diamonds around the cut outs for the gauges. If it works the way I hope it does, it will look great. I will post photos here if it works out.
I wanted to bump this thread back up becase I am into my gauge cluster build (finally) and want to keep watch on this thread. I would like to hear from anyone who has responded in here before to get some updated photos from the last posts in here.
Ivan, do you have a shot of your dash after installing it?
I will put some photos in here of my setup. After much debating I think that I have all my plans set and that it is going to make a great custom look to my truck.
That "FatMat" material looks like and is described similar to another material that is readily available. You can go to the local Home Box store or hardware store and buy what I think is the same thing. It is used for gutter repair. It has an aluminum layer with an adhesive rubber backing. It is very formable and I have used it to repair rusted thru areas of floorboards before when I did not want to remove everything to weld in panels. It sticks very well and I have never had any come loose even when used on the underside of floor panels. It deadens sound very well. It comes in rolls about 6-8" wide and it is cheap. I have used it to deaden noise on stainless steel kitchen sinks before.
Lexan (trademark for GE) polycarbonate sheet can be purchased at any plastic supply house in many thicknesses and in several colors. The plastic supply house that I deal with has a scrap bin that has small pieces also for cheap or even free sometimes. Look in the telephone directory if you live near a larger city.
Using smoked Lexan you could even mount your gages and indicator lights behind the sheet and use the illumination bulbs to make them visible. That might look prety cool if when everything was off it was just a smooth black surface.
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This is exactly what I was going to do with my dash. I took out my black insert and cut the bars out of the center, as you have. But after looking at it and seeing some others posts in here, I decided I wanted a more custom look, so I am replacing the wntire black piece.
Nice job though! If I was keeping this piece, this is exactly how I would do mine.
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I thought I would try to keep the stock look of the dash but make the gauges more useful. The center is blocked because the monster tach sits on the steering column and blocks it anyway. The speedo sits behind the plastic panel and LED's take care of blinkers and high beams. This was a mock up, I'll have it wired in this week or next if the weather gives me a chance.
I like that speedometer. What about your water pres. and oil temp. gauges? Also, did you use the stock sending unit for the gas gauge? I have dual tanks on mine and was planning on keeping the sending units in both tanks and using the stock control switch for the tanks and wiring the new gauge to this switch.
I have a second panel that's mounted to the lower left of the dash with oil/water/volts. I just put in a new tank and sender unit (Ford parts), they are compatible with the Automoter gauge.
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