So you wanna make your own gauge faces?
Here you are. You've decided you don't like any of the mass market gauge faces available for your car (probably a Miata since you're at this site) and you want to make your own. Excellent! Welcome to a very cheap, very LONG project.
Designing the gauges will take you anywhere from 2 to 60 hours. I use Adobe Illustrator and have decided to post a very stripped out gauge face template on this site.
Grab a zip file and check it out. We'll talk about it in a minute.
After you settle on a design, you get to print your gauge faces.
You must use a high quality color laser printer. A fancy dye-sub printer might work, but an ink jet WILL NOT. The spray adhesive will liquefy ink jet ink. I suggest going to Kinko's and spending $5 on a few sheets from their nicest color laser printer. Print 5-10 copies of your gauge faces and get them all run on the same printer. Different printers can and will put your tick marks on slightly different spots on the page.
Then you get to glue your two or three layer gauge faces together. This will take you the better part of an evening.
Figure four hours to get at least one perfect set of gauges put together. It's nice to do this on an evening and let the spray adhesive dry overnight. You'll get a very solid gauge sandwich doing it like that.
The next day, you get to spend
2-3 hours with latex gloves on your hands while you cut out the gauges. Why? Because while you can wipe off a few fingerprints, you cannot wipe off as many as you'll put on a gauge while cutting out the little circles. Your finger prints will finally eat through the top printed layer, so you must wear gloves.
FINALLY, you get to install the gauges and fit the needles. If you've done this before, it's a 10 minute job. It takes a bit longer your first time.
So you're up to about an
8 to 80 hour project. Still want to make gauges instead of just buy them?
