I'm in the process of making a custom dash cluster for my 89' TII, and when i'm done, i'm thinking of possibly getting a few donor dashboards and selling a few if it turns out looking pretty good. The ONLY problem i'm having is the lighting. If I just use things to cover over the old dash parts, i'm still stuck with the old orange. I wanted white with blue text gauges. Basically its backlit, so with only cover over images, the only option left i'm seeing is put little LED's for each gauge on the dash to light it up, but somethings telling me its going to be a royal pain in the ****, and not even look too great. Anyone have any suggestions? My last thought would be to buy some electroluminescent strips and put them behind custom printed parts, but that would get pretty expensive.

 

so i'm guessing by the 27 views and no posts that nobody has any ideas? Well I have an idea of my own. First however, I need to know how to remove the gauge dials without screwing them up. If I can do that, I can easily do what I want to do.

 

People probably havn't posted because they don't know how to help you.

I'd suggest looking in your manual(and if you don't have one go buy a Haynes) to figure out your problem.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

 

hehehhhe.....been there done that

what I suggest you is to go to the junk yard and get some spair ones in case you brake the needles- gauge dials...

I used a screw driver and slightly pulled them up.

not long ago I've purchased the inverse glow gauges over E-bay ( white and blue numbers at night )...you can find them very cheap.

 

If you are taking the needles off the gauges... use a fork. I've taken 6-7 SETS apart that way, NEVER had a problem. Make sure they're at "0" or EOT before you do that.

If you are having trouble taking the acutal gauge pod out... eh... just look harder, there are 5 or 6 screws holding the surround, then 4 holding the gauges, and the wiring bundles unclip from the center (small plastic pin that slides over then pull) the speedo just unclips and slides back. It's really pretty easy, I figured it out in ~2-3 minutes.

 

I have an extra gauge cluster from when mine was like making the buzzing sound at 3k rpms and the blinker lights would always be on and when they blinked my rpms would drop like 1k, lol

I already scanned in all the seperate gauges and photoshopped some pretty sweet new ones, and printed them out on paper, exacto knifed them so they would fit on top of the old gauges, and it looks pretty cool, but for the actuall work i'm going to have to get probably a sign shop to print white over blue plexiglass.

The way the stock ones seem to be done is theres orange plexi with black mask on it, so the lights in the back only shine through the orange, hence the glowing orange gauges. I want to make the plexi blue and get white over it so it will shine blue and still be white without the whole face glowing.

The only reason i'm even looking for a way to do this myself is because they have indiglo and reverse gauges for EVERY different year and NA/Turbo combo EXCEPT the S5 TII's for some damned reason, so i've set out to make my own and have them be even cooler because i'll design them.

To print white over the plexi, I may either have to get sheets of white and tediously cut out the shapes with an exacto knife, or get it easily (but i'm sure not cheaply) done by a sign printing shop or a place that sells printable glass sticker sheets.

If it turns out being really cheap, I can do the plexi cutouts in any color people want them to be in, have templates for gauges, or just make custom gauges to fit whatever the person needs and i'll sell some. We'll see how it goes, just need to talk to someone at the printing shop 10 minutes down the road and i'll get more into this idea.

If anyone has any suggestions for improvements on what I plan to do, lemme know.

- Brian

 

You may want to try a vinly print shop for the white face gauges. Many of these graphics sign shops are able to cut with a high enough precision.

Another option, which I was selfishly hesitant to share, was laser etching. With your images, if you walk into the right laser etching shop, they can take your photoshop images and etch right on the piece of plexi or acyrilic the gauge pattern you've created. They could either etch negatively on a color of plexi to make the surround fogged, of you can get a thin piece of mylar or opaque plexi and have them actually cut the image out.

I'm eventually going to do this for myself, but I'm too busy with reliability mods for the immediate time being. I know this is possible because I was at one time a sales rep for a company with a 100 000 dollar machine that could actually etc photographic quality images onto glass, annodized aluminum, marble, granite etc. as large as a 4x8 sheet. With plastic, we were able to even cut out letters for signage.

 

yea vinly might be a good idea also, i'll check the places around here to see how much it would cost.

 

The reason they don't make your gauges is because it is by far the rarest model of Rex out there. The S4's outnumber the S5's by like a kabillion and the turbos are even more rare. Combine the two and you have a product that you may sell a dozen of a year if you are lucky, but there are 10's of thousands of 86-87 RX-7's out there. It's kinda like me looking for a vert. spoiler, they almost don't exist. I found one though....right here on the boards. I had a Conquest TSi and had to make my own gauges once, since NOBODY makes anything for that car. I printed them out on photo paper, and with them front lit they looked perfect. Good luck.

John

I CAN'T WAIT FOR MY FIRST ISSUE OF RX-TUNER!!!!!!

 

Sounds like it is going to look pretty cool. Are you adding any gauges to the cluster, or keeping the stock gauges ? Post pics when you are done please. I don't think I will ever change my gauges, the stock orange is just too cool in my opinion.

As for Rx7 Tuner, I would get it, but its kind of expensive right now. I will wait until a bunch of you get it, so the price goes down, then I will get in on it.

 

I'm using the stock gauge locations for the S5 TII, I might have to keep the stock print locations for everything, because if I changed them up, the backlighting would be off by a bit. I'll have to experiment, but my first trial will be white faces with blue backlit print in the stock locations.

I think i'll print out some trial paper ones w/o the backlighting to see how it looks. I already tried out the oil/boost gauges, and it looks pretty decent, but I think I have to see them as a whole to really get the idea of how its going to look.

 

I was in Kevin landers vert this weekend and he has blue and white gauges. They look cool and you can buy them on ebay for about 30bucks.

 

wish i can see some good out come
coz dashboard will be my next project

 

That's what I was talking about above, they don't make them for S5 TII's

 

wait this may sound stupid but why don't you just buy the reverse indiglo ones from corksport or something? the ones that have the numbers that light up blue...

it says they are silver but couldnt you make a white overlay for it?