Face plate inside gauge cluster

[78GroundUp]

What's your opinion? The more responses I get will help me decide what to do...:

Found a company that will laser print and restore face plates inside the gauge clusters. The initial set-up cost is pretty outrageous, artist, layout, etc.

That said, as a way to give back to fellow Mudders I might go ahead and do it if you all would use it...

Once they have the artwork... It is a pretty simple process....

Any color you want....

How much would you pay?? For brand new plates.....

 

[Biscuit]

Will the speedo plates be stamped to recess where the needle attaches? Will the odometer window be stamped with the bevel or simply cut?

What generations of gauges would be supported?

By laser print do you mean laser cut?

I might be interested in blank unpanted gauge faces so I can offer a 'more deluxe' version of my face improvement kits.

 

[FJsnoozer]

Honestly , not much. The reason for this is how much I have total in my guage restoration using a fellow member kit https://forum.ih8mud.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=613337&stc=1&d=1332439134

 

[78GroundUp]

This would actually be screen printed as it was done from factory. Not done in vinyl letters. No cutting or chopping. You would send in face plates for all gauges come back with "screen printed" - not in vinyl letters. No stickers.

Screen printed is a form of painting as far as I understand it.

 

[Biscuit]

I had looked into screen printing. It is a paint process that can yield finer details than the vinyl (think the international battery symbol the + and - are tiny).

It's an intriguing option for the purist as even the tiny logos on the gauges can be replicated.

 

[78GroundUp]

Exactly, vinyl is what it is. Very hard to get the fine details when cutting another application. To my understanding they use a laser to define the printing area.... Much like t shirt screen printing to the 'enth degree. Just able to get cleaner lines.

Unfortunately paying the artist to get the exact vectorized artwork into a EPS. file is not cheap . That said once the artwork is computerized it becomes much more affordable.

Where I was getting to.... If said owner wanted it back to factory they could get it..... But won't be $70.00 all said and done like "snoozer" prefers. Just depends what the desired outcome is?? Anybody interested in a no rust factory faceplates??

 

[Advrider639]

Where does one acquire a kit like you posted snoozer?

I would like to fix up my cluster.

 

[RedHeadedStepChild]

During his BJ44 resto, Folkert had the glove box plate reproduced and did a beautiful job with all the details of the Japanese characters. I believe he scanned the original scuffed up plate he had and worked with the scan to save art time. If you can't find details here on Mud, you can at least find a link to his blog. This may help. If not, well it's a cool blog/site anyway.
If the price wasn't outrageous I'd consider it (in km/h). I'll need to do something with mine, but that's low on the list.

 

[78GroundUp]

The cost is formatting the proper placement on the face plate. Font is not a problem rather placement on the plate.

When you say K/ph do you mean that K's are the primary number?? I have not seen that. Do they put M/ph on the inside?

 

[Bear]

GroundUp,

Sounds interesting.
But which of the many speedo faces and which of the gauge faces would be chosen for the project?
Is the new printing to be on the customer's plate, or is it a core charge/exchange for one of their plates?

Hypothetically, if say 25 customers decided to go with this, what would the pricing be?
Is there to be a price-break if only the speedometer plate is wanted?
Could a version be created to substitute a voltmeter for the ammeter?

Where does the high cost come in?
Aren't there alignment marks from Koito on the existing faceplates?
Couldn't a super clean existing faceplate be used to scan, the font, markings, etc. exactly as originally painted? An artist would only be needed to possibly clean up any rough edges, if any.

If you do decide to go ahead, you should ask to keep the artwork or disc since you are paying for it, so you could potentially replicate it down the line.

 

[bj40green]

When you say K/ph do you mean that K's are the primary number?? I have not seen that. Do they put M/ph on the inside?

You want to see different face plates?
KM outside, M inside, just KM, just M, and all other combinations?
Click here --> https://forum.ih8mud.com/40-55-series-tech/544543-clusters-gauges-odo-meters.html

Rudi

 

[78GroundUp]

Thanks Rudi, very interesting.

Thinking more.... Any plate different than what I am using would have to be converted into a data file. <-- this is the greatest expense.
Once they have that file it is not so bad.... I would also think (my assumption) is that once they have one or two laid out..... Just a matter of cross matching data and moving/adjusting accordingly. I would think for every plate scanned the next one would be easier/quicker ....therefore cheaper.

 

[amaurer]

I can vectorize whatever artwork you need. Doing so is a task that I needed to do all the time to drive the mill for my knob engraving business so I ended up writing my own software for it.

Also... re. screen printing, I have some experience in that arena too. Depending on how you do it, it can range for nearly impossible to trivially easy.

My fiancee and I made a wedding present (a board game) for some friends of mine and bought pre-coated screen printing stencils from EZscreenprint LLC. Basically you print your artwork from the computer onto a transparency. Then you expose the pre-coated stencil through the transparency to sunlight, and then wash it - anywhere that was blocked by the ink washes away, while anything that the sun touched is insoluble.

Here is our results on our first try... its quite easy, I found:

 

[78GroundUp]

I can vectorize whatever artwork you need. Doing so is a task that I needed to do all the time to drive the mill for my knob engraving business so I ended up writing my own software for it.

Also... re. screen printing, I have some experience in that arena too. Depending on how you do it, it can range for nearly impossible to trivially easy.

My fiancee and I made a wedding present (a board game) for some friends of mine and bought pre-coated screen printing stencils from EZscreenprint LLC. Basically you print your artwork from the computer onto a transparency. Then you expose the pre-coated stencil through the transparency to sunlight, and then wash it - anywhere that was blocked by the ink washes away, while anything that the sun touched is insoluble.

Here is our results on our first try... its quite easy, I found:

Didn't I see something about you leaving the LC world? Maybe you can help explain the process better.... By the way your game pics look awesome!!

It is my understanding that making vectorized artwork is taking the scanned item and digitizing and measuring it so it will fall in the exact spot on the piece. She said they could even replicate the miniature TEQ in the bottom corners of the faces...... Factory new??

Once the have digital files ready.... The process of sending in the piece (cleaned and powder coated) they print it. Bright white

Now back to your process.... Which might work for my desired results....
EZscreen is the company? Or the process? A specific website you prefer? I would like to look into it more.

Thanks for the positive and informative input

 

[amaurer]

Didn't I see something about you leaving the LC world? Maybe you can help explain the process better.... By the way your game pics look awesome!!

It is my understanding that making vectorized artwork is taking the scanned item and digitizing and measuring it so it will fall in the exact spot on the piece. She said they could even replicate the miniature TEQ in the bottom corners of the faces...... Factory new??

Once the have digital files ready.... The process of sending in the piece (cleaned and powder coated) they print it. Bright white

Now back to your process.... Which might work for my desired results....
EZscreen is the company? Or the process? A specific website you prefer? I would like to look into it more.

Thanks for the positive and informative input

I'm leaving the LC business world... which really only means I'm no longer guaranteeing any degree of customer service. But I'll definitely still be contributing fun things that interest me or serve my own interests.

So, re. vectorizing - when you digitize something you can store it in two different ways on a computer:

One way is as a conventional picture, which is just a big square of pixels with a color value saved for each pixel. The computer only sees this as a big square of color data, but your eyes see it as... well... as whatever the picture is of. This is called a "raster" graphic, e.g. a .bmp, .jpg, .gif, etc etc.

The other way is called a vector graphic. Instead of just a big square of pixels and color data, vector graphics are composed of lines and paths that define the boundary of every shape or region of color in an image. These vector graphics are commonly found as a .svg, .ai, .dxf, .eps, etc.

You may be thinking that that sounds like a pretty subtle difference, but really its HUGE. For one, you can zoom in infinitely on a vector graphic without ever losing any quality (aka it never looks "pixelated"). But the big difference is that a vector graphic is stored with real coordinates; that is, when you print a vector graphic the file contains information that tells the printer exactly how many inches across it should be. Whereas when you print a raster graphic there are all kinds of assumptions going on; how big is a pixel when you print it? No one knows: its different on every computer, printer, and paper size.

Raster to vector conversion is one of those Big Deals in the computing world today. The problem boils down to - if you had a picture of something, how would you get a computer to pick out all the straight lines and arcs in a photo? As smart as computers are, doing this reliably is very very hard even today.

There is no real substitute today for someone just carefully tracing the source graphic into vector format. There are a number of automatic procedures, and indeed I wrote one of my own for knoobs.com, but ultimately if you want it done right a human hand is the only thing that REALLY works.

 

[amaurer]

re. screen printing.

The big trouble with screen printing is making the stencil. Basically you take a super fine mesh, like fine silk (the process is also called silk screening) and force ink through the mesh to adhere to the object. By "blocking out" parts of the mesh with some material or chemical you can create a stencil like you're probably familiar with.

The advantage is a) the mesh gives you a nice smooth surface to slide a squeegeee over, to force the thick ink onto the object, and b) the mesh supports "free" parts of the stencil... so for example with a traditional cut-out stencil stencilling an "O" would be impossible, since the center would be disconnected; you'd have to use a stencil like this (http://101coloringpages.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/o-stencil-468x468.gif) instead... which sucks.

But... how to block out parts of the stencil accurately?? The answer is called "photoresist", which is the same chemical process used for making circuit boards. Its a chemical that washes away in water... UNLESS its exposed to light, in which case it becomes permanently impervious to nearly everything.

Applying photo-resist to circuit boards and silkscreens has been a big of a problem to get the thickness and composition right, until people started selling precoated substrates. Thats why I plugged the EZScreenprint company (EZScreenPrint - SCREEN PRINTING IN LESS THAN AN HOUR!) because they sell stencil precoated with photoresist, just begging to be exposed into whatever shape you desire. All you have to do is print out (with a conventional printer) your pattern properly scaled - you don't even have to use a transparency, actually - you can expose the stencils right through regular paper as well.

 

[78GroundUp]

I'm leaving the LC business world... which really only means I'm no longer guaranteeing any degree of customer service. But I'll definitely still be contributing fun things that interest me or serve my own interests.

So, re. vectorizing - when you digitize something you can store it in two different ways on a computer:

One way is as a conventional picture, which is just a big square of pixels with a color value saved for each pixel. The computer only sees this as a big square of color data, but your eyes see it as... well... as whatever the picture is of. This is called a "raster" graphic, e.g. a .bmp, .jpg, .gif, etc etc.

The other way is called a vector graphic. Instead of just a big square of pixels and color data, vector graphics are composed of lines and paths that define the boundary of every shape or region of color in an image. These vector graphics are commonly found as a .svg, .ai, .dxf, .eps, etc.

You may be thinking that that sounds like a pretty subtle difference, but really its HUGE. For one, you can zoom in infinitely on a vector graphic without ever losing any quality (aka it never looks "pixelated"). But the big difference is that a vector graphic is stored with real coordinates; that is, when you print a vector graphic the file contains information that tells the printer exactly how many inches across it should be. Whereas when you print a raster graphic there are all kinds of assumptions going on; how big is a pixel when you print it? No one knows: its different on every computer, printer, and paper size.

Raster to vector conversion is one of those Big Deals in the computing world today. The problem boils down to - if you had a picture of something, how would you get a computer to pick out all the straight lines and arcs in a photo? As smart as computers are, doing this reliably is very very hard even today.

There is no real substitute today for someone just carefully tracing the source graphic into vector format. There are a number of automatic procedures, and indeed I wrote one of my own for knoobs.com, but ultimately if you want it done right a human hand is the only thing that REALLY works.

Does this interest you??

Basically I can send her a vectorized EPS. file and the clean faces and she can print anything we want....

But only if your interested....

You seem to understand my desired result..... Is this a project you would be interested in?? Or is this something I could easily figure out????

 

[FJsnoozer]

To answer your original question in the thread, I think your price point is probably around $200 actually 250-275 if you are going to include the additional stamped piece discussed below. I know I would get out my checkbook for that, It just want available at the time.

Are you doing just the faces, or are you also doing the inner stamped plate that has the OIL AMP TEMP and FUEL.

Its a cool idea but the issue is all of the people that say they will want them and buy them wont neccessarily buy them in the production run. You might be able to get enough people to get close to the break even, which I see the entire goal of your thread. The question is, would 2500 even cover your tooling for a production run of 10....

Good luck.

Where does one acquire a kit like you posted snoozer?

I would like to fix up my cluster.

PM Biscuit

I respect and enjoy the accomplishments you make with a rattle can. I mean that...., it is impressive. But IMO- paint without a hardener/reducer is temporary.... It just is. Scientifically speaking it is unable to hold up to all the elements.

Neither is the paint they will use. Proof in point: your and my Factory Bezels which ARE rusted after 30 years.
I count on having to redo this at some point in ownership of the truck because neither method is permanent. My stock bezel specifically had issues with rust forming where the letters were painted from the factory. That screening will outlast the vinyl, but will not last 30 years in a Florida and Texas climate.

Have you taken the guages apart yet? Each face plate has a specific design which includes stops for the needles. On some of the gauges, this is notched out and bent upwared. I'd be interested to see how this will be replicated affordably. Perhaps some brass pins.


I'm willing to delete the nonsense to clean up the thread. I am PMing you instead of airing grievances here.

 

[AlexJet]

Interesting reading.
If I could do a custom speedo, say in different color from original in km/h primary scale and mph secondary, that would be interesting point.

 

[Biscuit]

Just to make sure I'm understanding this, there is a preference of some Mudders for painted gauge faces instead of vinyl.

I may have a cheaper and more flexible DIY option. I can source a masking vinyl. Basically paint the gauge face white with whatever paint you prefer, let it dry/cure, apply the mask vinyl decal(s), paint the gauge face black with your paint of choice, remove the mask decals. That way you can end up with a painted face that can be custom ordered without the upfront cost for each different configuration. (Because I have my own modular artwork for the gauges)

78GroundUp would this method work for you? I'm not saying it is perfect, but it may give you more control over the paint choice for longevity.