I got some fluorescent red paint from hipopart.com to restore my gauge needles to original color as opposed to nasty faded orange/yellow. Has anyone used their paint or painted needles in general? Paint is very thin and watery so I'm trying to go slow with as many thin coats as it takes. Any tips would be great!

Also got their 5 SMD LED lights for the cluster. Hopefully that brightens things up.

 

Well, I think I've got enough coverage. It seems to dry quick but I'll see tomorrow. Then I can paint the yellow/red for redline on the tach. I'm worried the yellow I got is too bright/neon but maybe it'll dry darker. The other yellow I have is probably too dark. I guess anything is better than faded.

 

Exactly... you will get used to it, no matter the shade it ends up being...

 

I painted mine this past summer but I'm not happy with how they turned out. I used florescent orange but its too dark, almost red in color. I'm going to do some looking in the hobby stores and see if I can find something a little more orange.

 

I'm going to install aftermarket gauges and want them to match the factory gauges. At this point I think I'm going with the VDO gauges like this, so if you see a paint that seems to match the red needles please tell me.

 

Finished tonight and got them in the truck. I think they came out very nice...





5 SMD LEDs in warm white from hipoparts ... Two different exposures, actual brightness is somewhere inbetween and immenslely brighter than factory.





The paints I used... Model Masters Fluorescent yellow for the yellow part of redline and hipoparts fluorescent red for the needles and redline.




I'm very pleased with the results between cleaning, fresh paint, and LEDs. Did not paint the auto trans needle. Didn't feel like removing that from the column as the truck will be getting a ZF5 and the blank plate there along with a manual trans column I have.

 

Looks good.

 

Looks good indeed! But why warm white and not cool white?

 

I was hoping to keep the greenish original color through those blue lenses. Cool white is a more pure white and would be "whiter" than warm white, which is no good for night vision. Green and red light don't affect your night vision so much as other colors. I think this color is alright, blue/green hue but definitely more white than incandescent. I think going with green LEDs and removing the blue lenses would have been closer to original. If it bothers me over time I'll consider switching to green and removing the blue lenses.

 

I didn't realize you retained the blue filters when you installed the LED's. That complicates things a bit as I try to figure out what color LED I want to use as I don't want to use the old filters that have darkened and no longer pass much light. But, I don't think the green LED's replicate the original color since I remember it as more blue than green.

As for night vision, I just did a bit of reading on that and understand that we can't use it to read our gauges as night vision doesn't allow us to see details - like the numbers on the gauges. So, all we can do is to minimize the damage we do to our night vision by selecting lighting that allows us to read the gauges at the lowest lighting levels. And from what I've read there are several opinions about what color is best for that, with the main choices being either white or blue-green.

I'm leaning to the cool-white LED's from SuperBrightLEDs, which I think will be closer to the original lighting than green. And, they give a color that is easily seen by our eyes, which means the level of light can be kept low to preserve night vision. But, I'm confused about the CCTV/wavelength rating given by SuperBright since the cool-white is rated in temp and the rest of the LED's are rated in wavelength, so I'm still researching the subject.

 

Looking forward to seeing the results of your choice, Gary.

'cadunkle' - the paint job on those gauges look great!

 

I did mine with the same paint. Mine came out darker than most, but that's alright. It will take longer to fade lol.



My tachometer needle is the same color as the rest of the gauges, crappy picture.

 

Matthew - Looks good. Except for the tach needle.

Have you changed the lighting?

 

Nope, still has the original green filters. I just leave it on the max setting. My eyes are bothered easily at night and if they're too bright I get really bad eye strain so I just left them lol.

 

Maybe after cataract surgery I will be able to see Rusty's gauges at night, but right now the are so dim as to be almost unusable - with the filters off. So I'm going back with the LED's on Dad's truck, and will be painting both the needles as well as refreshing the white on the inside of the bezels so they reflect more light.