Hey guys, my painting of gauges was unsuccessful, but I decided to try the gear selector and painted it orange/yellow, and it came out great, for some reason yellow worked well as blue did not. So what do you think?





John griggs how to was a big help and he kind of inspired it, I just recieved a sport trac gear selector as it will match my tremor gauges, so I will be selling this one if anyone is interested!

 

looks cool

 

jon that looks killer... if i had a gear selector i would be all over that :D

 

very cool dude, what was going to be blue?

 

Very nice! Did you use glass paint or light repair tape? Either way, very nice! I've done mine in blue, but N and P were left green to distinguish them. Next time I have the dash off, though, I'm going to make them all blue. I don't like the blue and green color mix.

 

Quick question about that paint, IM looking to go all blue lights and some purple, but do they even make purple?

 

they look great.. lol, at first glance, i didnt even notice they were painted, i assummed the stock color was that yellow!!! i guess that means it turned out real well!! good job!

 

The kit I bought has purple in it. Look at my how-to on dash color change on my CarDomain site for the kit I bought. I'm sure other kits have it also.

 

Since your truck is blue and you seem to have a lot of blue accents throughout the interior of your truck, painting the gear selector BLUE would have been a great idea. Maybe you should try it with a brighter blue instead? That might make it show up better.

 

Thanks for the compliments. 2Ranger2, that was my goal, was blue. But I cant get an even layer of blue on it, I have an extra gear selector laying around, and I took extreme care in trying to make it even, but in the end, it just came out uneven like my experimental gauges did. But for some reason the yellow came out even, i think its just the nature of the color. John, I used glass paint on that and a thin paintbrush, im very pleased with the results. I wish I could use the blue paint, but I cant get an even spread, even if I take my sweet time. Im about to do this again though, cause I got a gear selector from an explorer sport trac, which matches my tremor gauges.

 

Use a rounded rod and spread the paint instead of brushing it and see what happens. I did not use a brush on mine.

Looks good regardless! I have a red dash, blue highlights, and all warning lights are yellow so they stand out.

 

Where can I find one of these at? Wal-mart? hobby store?

 

Well, mine came in the kit with my paint. I'm not sure how you get them by themselves -- I'm not that kind of a "craft person", lol. I think if you go in one of those mega-hobby stores like Michaels (out here anyway) they'll have something, but who knows?

 

hey looks good jon

 

Well, trying this out myself. I'm starting on the HVAC controls as I'm slow w/ this sort of thing. Too many other things going on in life. Rightnow I've got the insert pulled out and on my desk at home w/ the controls re-assembled in the truck. Man, those lights are BRIGHT w/o the insert!

Anyhow, on a suggestion from my GF I tried some acetone to try to remove the paint on the inserts. It works GREAT! And doesn't scratch the insert at all. My first test w/ a screwdriver I ended up deforming the insert rather badly. After that I was making very slow headway w/ an exacto-blade. But the acetone accelerated things quite nicely! Tonight I'll try getting a bit more of the green crap off and then lay down some paint.. If I can find the time that is.

I was at the craft store (Michaels) buying the paint and couldn't find much of anything suitable for rolling the paint on. I was looking for one of those rollers that the use (or I thought they used anyhow) for stencil crafts and that sort of thing. I couldn't find anything! In the end I found an innexpensive rolling-pin sort of thing for rolling out craft clay. I'm not sure how that will work out though. I may just see if I can find something in the scrap pile from our machine shop (aluminum rod maybe) instead. I really want to make the blue work for me. I've got the center part of the insert masked off (I want that to remain white) and ready to go.

More to come..

 

Lookin good!

 

Finally got around to this myself. After consulting w/ Wowak and John's cardomain (thanks guys!) I decided to pull apart my HVAC controls and paint them. I'm too chicken to pull apart the instrument cluster (at least for now) and needed the truck in working order while I spent many days painting and such.

Anyhow, as per Wowak's suggestion I used 2 LEDs per regular bulb 'pyramided' as per John's recommendation. I used a 470 ohm resistor, which should put the 2 LEDs well under their Imax but still left plenty of brightness. By pure luck the level seems to match the rest of the dash pretty well!

Overall it looks pretty good. I have two 'hot-spots'. One bad enough to make me want to pull the thing apart and try to rework, but not until it's warmer. I used blue paint and got it pretty even. The wonderful thing about the HVAC controls is that I could use acetone as my GF advised and remove ALL the green at once, then repaint. Also there's another layer of plastic above the insert, so it distributes the light a little well. But that paint IS very hard to get even. I used the included aplicator to roll the paint on, again, as per John's suggestion.

In all I'll give it a definite -d, meaning one thumb up, one thumb undecided. Maybe I can come up w/ a picture or two someday..

Next up: fog lamp button!

 

ok thanks John. I'm kinda going with a blue and purple neon theme in my truck for show reasons only.