Post holiday progress - dash gauges

 The other job I have ongoing is the dash gauges. With the current positioning on the back board they don't fit in the dash, it's simply too tall for the smaller gauges;

The gauges are that far apart because of the extra tabs that I don't need. So first job was to trim those bits off;

Now that they're gone it's clear that the two smaller gauges can be tightened up. In addition the circuit board on the temp gauge was sticking out the bottom. This hosts a couple of resistors which I moved;

With those moved I could trim the board;

Then the two small gauges can be brought in tighter;

This gains me about an inch on the bottom. As a last step I drilled holes for the illumination;

Two bulbs each for the larger gauges, and one each for the smaller ones. The two in between the speedo and rev counter were a bit tight but it looks ok. And here's the finished article;

The gap from the bulbs to the plastic lens is good and should work well;

Now that things are tightened up and ready to go, I need to make the box. It'll be a strip of aluminium bent at the right locations on the corners. It needs to come up on the sides to bolt to the steel crossbar hidden underneath the dash. A couple of bolts will be fine for that, it'll be tight against the body on the dash and on the top. Then a short wiring loom for the rev counter, oil pressure and temp gauges (speedo has no electronics), a connector on the end then that's a self contained unit done. 

Oh, and talking of the dash... I got a length of tube that covers the bottom radius of the dash for the IVA... and it looks awful! It's a really big radius to deal with when it's a hard surface, and I don't think I can get away with it. So once again I'm leaning towards a soft panel for the dash, reusing some of the pleather that will make up the seats. I might take a photo of the dash as it is and do some practices with photoshop. I also need to figure out what is meant by 'soft', I don't want it too thick (5mm max sort of thing), but I want to make sure I cover the requirements. Hopefully if I can use some very thin yoga mat type material then I'll be good. Once that's decided I can work with a much smaller radius on the bottom.