Thursday, September 29, 2011

Gauge Faces

I found a site a few days ago that talked about printing your very own custom gauge faces for your car or truck's instrument panel.  This would help one to know that whether they were obeying the letter of the traffic law or sticking it to the man by endangering themselves and others they could do it in their very own style.  But this also signaled (get it?) to me that I could custom design my own steampunk gauges for various instrumentation.  You can pick up a pack of printable transparencies at an office supply store that allow you to print on one side and make your own gauges.  The first design I found was this fairly basic speedometer face:


By taking a little time in Photoshop I was able to remove several of the original features of this gauge and start cleaning things up to try to get more into the realm of a general instrument to measure whatever might be needed in supra-Victorian science.


I removed the main indicator hand because presumably when I print this new face out I will place it into a gauge that will have a real arrow to replace the pictured one.  The numbers indicated here are also a little too much like something on a dashboard so I took them out too.

I then copied the small empty box on the left hand side of the original gauge and put another one on the right side.  Then I filled it with a little bit of red to indicate that this would be the dangerous end of the spectrum for our measurements.


Changing the background color of the faceplate allowed me to make this one looks a little less clean than the original pic and I also came up with a name for this instrument.  This aetherometer would obviously be used to monitor the amount of pressure of particulate interaction within the aether itself.  Very useful when manning a personal airship.  I will probably try to also find some sort of gradient pattern to superimpose over the face to try to give a more aged appearance.




2 comments:

  1. Cool idea, I'm looking for ideas on customizing the gauges for my car I'm restoring (a Corvette-powered 1981 Jaguar XJ6.) We're doing hardwood floors and steam-punking as much of the interior as possible. It seems the only way to go with the gauges is to build the whole thing custom and/or simply change the faceplate "image" - a much better option IMO! I'll be extrapolating from your idea. I'm still about 2 years off from such finishing touches, but how to make the most of the gauges has been giving me fits!

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    1. That sounds like an amazing project to undertake! You will have to post some images of your process for others to be able to see how this comes together, I know I would love to see it. Do you have any idea yet what the gauges, for example, might end up looking like?

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