I hadn't touched the truck since that last post/January 2016 stuff really until January of this year. So that's another year gone of this beast just sitting. We had a son in the mean time, (8 months old now), my daughter just turned 3 and I'm now at the stage in life I never used to understand = when my "truck buddies" were too busy to have time to work on their projects. Kids are a blast & I love my family, and as much as I WANT to work on this thing, it's just hard finding the time.
I sneak out in the garage when I can after my wife falls asleep on the couch at night. This usually gives me from about 10 PM until I'm too tired (sometimes 1 AM, most of the time 11 or so) to get whatever I can figure out QUIETLY. I typically get stuck needing to cut, sand or drill something & I can't without waking up the wife or kids, so it gets put on hold until I can find time on a lunch break to try & rush through some noisy stuff.
This thing is inching forward though. Well, I take that back... Maybe not inching, more like millimetering forward, but hey, I'll take what I can.
Been playing a bit in cad, making small time parts/fittings orders & doing a lot of thinking.
Here's what I've been working on since I got snowed in while on vacation in January & had a lot of time to read & figure out what I wanted to do next & what to order.
1st up I resurrected my dash panel/gauge cluster design. I had a bunch of free time while stuck in the house in Oregon with everybody too sick to leave the house & so much snow outside it was hard to do anything. A couple late nights there & I know where I wanted to go with things when i got back here.
I had a surround layout I had started YEARS ago and I dove back in to that after looking at google images again for an hour or more & checking setups from here and the aluminum insert a guy is now selling on eBay, etc. I was tempted by the eBay one as it looks like a nice piece for the price, but I have 2-5/8" and 5" gauges & it was set up for 2-1/16" & 3-3/8" ones. Oh well, would it really be my truck if it wasn't full custom??
Here's where I was cad wise:
That lead to more cad. Cardboard Aided Design this time though
I just happened to have a spare dash here - which makes life a little easier for mock up purposes. I just had to crawl up in the rafters to get it & wipe an inch of dust off it...
A little more cad and then more cad
It was at this point I was realizing I am kind of an idiot for being cheap as I'm a bit OCD and my "cheapness" on parts would bug me & show...
I have a lot of gauges for this thing that I have been collecting for a while. All gauges but my pyro & boost that I put in a little on dash mount that I made when I was driving the donor are autometer pro-comps. Mostly liquid filled ones because they look race-y and "cool", and because the cummins will rattle this thing I'm sure so the the liquid will help that. Well, at least I convinced myself of that.
My pyro & boost are z series = black bezel (they were cheaper = this is where the cheapness bit me!) where as my pro-comps are silver bezel.
The tricky part & where my OCD kicked in is when I was trying to figure out a tach. I want things to match and of course all the pro-comp tachs were 9k rpm min. I don't need that on a diesel! They make the z series tachs all the way down to 4k, but that one is 2-1/16" and the black bezel & it won't mach...
So that's when the crazyness & figuring out layouts came in.
I decided I wanted to look at different layouts & I wanted to really SEE what these layouts or gauge configurations would look like, because I certainly didn't want to spend the $ on the gauges & time on the fab & come up with something I didn't like. I got the pics of the actual gauges from autometers website & sized them & dropped them in!
Here's another screen shot with all the gauge layouts I tried. You can't see the gauge images because they are so small, but I have 22 different configurations here with different sizes & bezel colors etc.
As I said I have a 5" speedo here that I had planned to use on the truck but I also started looking at the 3-3/8" stuff so as to try & match a tach.
More fun with cardboard starting
Keep in mind these pics represent hours of wasted time on cad & span 2 months or more in time. I work sloooow now!
I got to the point where I was trying to decide if I wanted to drop the cash on a new speedo or not, so I printed out the option I liked with the 5" speedo & threw it in the truck. I have seen these speedos in lots of race trucks & they never looked out of scale. Those are custom fabricated aluminum dashes though. I figured it would look fine in the truck right??? Hmmm
Ok, so maybe putting my ACTUAL speedo in it would help clarify
Yup, that decided it. Looks too big/out of scale (thanks Steve - if you are reading this!). Picture above doesn't do it justice as to how big/out of place this thing looks. The fact that the 5" speedo & 3-3/8" tach layout wouldn't allow fo things to be centered on the steering wheel didn't help the cause at all either.
So yeah, that's about where I left off. I have decided I'll go to a 3-3/8" speedo. I also decided to go to a 3-3/8" tach (the one gauge I had left to buy) for symmetry. While autometer does make a couple 5k tachs and 1 option in 4k they are all too small for what I think a tach should be at 2-1/16". They make 6k in 3-3/8" though so that is what I am going with. Now I just need to decide if I want a silver bezel to match the oil press, water temp, etc. or a black bezel to match the boost & pyro & the newly added fuel pressure gauge my brother got me for my birthday this year - which is also a z series (black bezel).
I keep going back & forth. I'm indecisive if you can't tell!!!
Thought was all silver bezel in the dash & then the 3 black bezel ones in a pillar pod. I then kind of liked the idea of leaving the 2 I already have in my dash pod I made & putting 1 black bezel centered above the tach & speedo in the dash (like is shown 2 pics up). In a perfect world this would be my pyro gauge, but I'm nervous about how that will work with pulling the dash panel if I have to as the thermocouple doesn't detach from the gauge so I'd have to pull the thermocouple from the exhaust manifold to pull the gauge pod fully.
The more I talk about this the more I think. No decision has been made, but I have the eBay auctions for both the black bezel stuff AND the silver bezel stuff open on my computer for when I decide to be spontaneous & pull the trigger.