Tuesday, May 14, 2013

The Gauge Panel

The original ford gauges
The Ford bezel with the center milled out

Needless to say, the stock ford gauges are woefully inadequate for a big rig of this nature.  So rather than tack on a few gauges with pop rivets and sheet metal screws I decided to make a new dash pane. With everything integrated nicely. I decided I wanted to have individual fuel gauges (one for each of the two tanks), along with a pyrometer, temp gage, oil pressure of course the tach and speedo. The six smaller gauges are Autometer’s GS line which I chose for the style of the gauge face as well as the fact that they glowed green when illuminated. The 4K tach and the Speedo are from Speed Hut and the speedo being GPS allowed me to not have to worry about adapting a cable from the transmission nor and inaccurate speed reading due to a change in tire diameter . after laying out the holes for the gauges, Idiot lights and the 4 rocker switches (controlling the intake heaters, KSB solenoid, manual cooling fan bypass, and fog lights) I milled it out on the VMC from a piece of ¼” Aluminum. Then I had it anodized black. I laid out the artwork in Illustrator but had a big fight with my laser engraver (who totally F’ed up a large batch of client work and refused to make good) so I dusted off the old 30K rpm air turbine and engraved the panel myself. The surface was uneven and I didn’t have the proper engraving bit so the engraving came out a bit uneven but here it is.


Gauges installed but not wired


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