Dashboard Panels and Gauges

Greetings dear readers!

Today was another interesting day out here in Irvine! With the shell due to arrive any day now, I'm sort of in a last minute scramble to get the garage cleaned up and re-organized. My main goal was to move the chassis over to the other side of the garage, and just do some overall cleaning. The far bay has more room than the near one, as the close one has the stairs leading down to the garage on it.

But who cares! Let's take a look at today's acquisitions. First up, I have a full set of instrument panels. I ordered these from www.jegs.com a few days ago. They arrived very quickly, and in great shape. (Fancy hat included for free, btw)

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my fellow builder Tim in Canada, who was kind enough to provide me with all of the part numbers for these gauges. I am pretty much following in Tim's footsteps, as he seems to know what he's doing, and is blogging the heck out of his build.

For reference, here's a list of the pieces I purchased:

2692 (Speedometer)
2699 (Tach)
2641 (Fuel)
2645 (Voltmeter)
2639 (Oil Temp)
2635 (Water Temp)
2644 (Ammeter)
2654 (Pyrometer)
2640 (Trans Temp)
2610 (VAC)

Please be sure to check out Tim's blog. He is a few months ahead of me in his build, and is doing a great job of keeping track of his progress. It's a great read.

Building the BatBerry

Today also saw the arrival of my laser cut dashboard panels. These were all painstakingly reproduced by none other than ... you guessed it, Tim! He not only drew these all up and made the plans available online for download, but he also passed along to me the contact information for the place that cut his set. They were really quite affordable, and turned out very nicely.

If you want to get a set for yourself, check out this website: http://www.lasercraft.ca/

Tell them you are looking to get a set cut from Tim's plans, and they will hook you right up. The thing I like most about this combination of gauges and dash panels is that they were designed for each other. I believe Tim did the drawings for the panels using the measurements of the gauges that he already owned. This should look really great once I get the dash up and running.

Lastly, tonight I had a visit from the very talented and dapper Zander Brandt, who runs ZProps. Zander appeared with me on stage at PAX for the panel we did on making props from video games. We not only did a lot of BS'ing, but I also did my best to pass on some of my mold making wisdom.

Check out Zanders Blog for some great pictures of his stuff, and see just what is possible with a scroll saw and some MDF!

If you haven't yet seen it, now is your chance to take a look at the panel that Zander and I spoke at, along with Volpin and Bill Duran. Check it out!