Savior
CEG'er
So I got bored with my cheap, crappy old S&H AutoTrends gauges in favor of some new ones. Here are the S&H gauges. People always complained about how sloppy the glow looked, and I never liked it much either; I always wanted the numbers to glow, not a vague blurry shape around the numbers; you could barely read the words on the HVAC panel. They weren't terrible, I just didn't like them all that much but didn't have anything better...
SOOO...
I pulled them off, scanned them, inverted them, cleaned them all up in Photoshopand edited them (adding my own custom icons and fonts), then took the files to work and printed them on the high-quality laser printer at 600dpi. Then I took them to FedEx Office (formerly Kinko's) and made high-quality copies of them onto plastic transparency sheets. I then cut them all out and lined them up, three layers deep for each gauge-face (so the backlighting would not show through the black parts); two transparency-layers with clear numbers (so as not to hinder the backlighting), and one layer of paper to make the numbers white and opaque but very brightly-lit. Here's my result...
*NOTE* - The crazy squiggly lighting is due to light-refraction through all the scratches in the clear plastic viewing-window in front of the the gauges, and the weird super-glow aura effect that some of the numbers have around them is just the camera adding halos to those numbers for some reason. The actual numbers, as can be seen in some of the shots (the tach on the first pic for example), are clean and precise.
Dig my Frost/Nuclear temp gauge? I guess going to college as an art major wasn't a COMPLETE waste after all...
HVAC:
And in the light, they look like normal non-SVT gauges. I have ordered some chrome trim-rings to contrast the black-out effect during the day and match the silver highlighting I've done around the dash. I'll post pics as soon as the arrive.
I was thinking of being the new premiere seller of custom gauges since noone else does it anymore, but being active duty Navy and soon to deploy, I really don't have time for that sort of thing. So, if anyone wants the original high-resolution scans and/or the HUGE but very cleaned-up Photoshop images (layers and all), let me know I'll email them to you with instructions or something.
Also, these gauge-faces are NOT colored; just white numbers. Which means, instead of blue LED's like I have, you could get amazing results with red, orange, purple, green, etc. as well with no modifications.
Whaddya think? Not too bad for a guy with a copy machine and some spare time, eh?
SOOO...
I pulled them off, scanned them, inverted them, cleaned them all up in Photoshopand edited them (adding my own custom icons and fonts), then took the files to work and printed them on the high-quality laser printer at 600dpi. Then I took them to FedEx Office (formerly Kinko's) and made high-quality copies of them onto plastic transparency sheets. I then cut them all out and lined them up, three layers deep for each gauge-face (so the backlighting would not show through the black parts); two transparency-layers with clear numbers (so as not to hinder the backlighting), and one layer of paper to make the numbers white and opaque but very brightly-lit. Here's my result...
*NOTE* - The crazy squiggly lighting is due to light-refraction through all the scratches in the clear plastic viewing-window in front of the the gauges, and the weird super-glow aura effect that some of the numbers have around them is just the camera adding halos to those numbers for some reason. The actual numbers, as can be seen in some of the shots (the tach on the first pic for example), are clean and precise.
Dig my Frost/Nuclear temp gauge? I guess going to college as an art major wasn't a COMPLETE waste after all...
HVAC:
And in the light, they look like normal non-SVT gauges. I have ordered some chrome trim-rings to contrast the black-out effect during the day and match the silver highlighting I've done around the dash. I'll post pics as soon as the arrive.
I was thinking of being the new premiere seller of custom gauges since noone else does it anymore, but being active duty Navy and soon to deploy, I really don't have time for that sort of thing. So, if anyone wants the original high-resolution scans and/or the HUGE but very cleaned-up Photoshop images (layers and all), let me know I'll email them to you with instructions or something.
Also, these gauge-faces are NOT colored; just white numbers. Which means, instead of blue LED's like I have, you could get amazing results with red, orange, purple, green, etc. as well with no modifications.
Whaddya think? Not too bad for a guy with a copy machine and some spare time, eh?
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