I decided to redo my gauges because I wanted to add an oil temp gauge and I wanted to add oil temp and pressure warning lights, and a coolant temp warning light.

 

 

Before

 

The first design used the OEM gauge plate frame.  Just the bare frame.  Then I made a aluminum & plastic sandwich and glued that to the frame.  The aluminum was necessary because the plastic was surprisingly weak.  Once I had it all shaped to fit I realized that I'd left myself no way to get to the top fasteners.  The plate has to be fastened in place with the gauges in it so it's not like you can use the gauge holes to get a screwdriver behind it.  So then I cut out the top part of the gauge plate and make a separate gauge face that would only hold the 3X 2 5/8th gauges.  But I didn't like how that looked so I abandoned that idea.

 

The next day I got some stronger scrap plastic from a local sign shop.  It was a hard acrylic sort of stuff.  Strong enough that it didn't need a layer of aluminum.  But on my next to last hole, a new drill bit grabbed the plastic too hard it it practically exploded in shards.  I attempted to glue it back together, but that looked like crap.

 

It turned out to be surprisingly challenging just drilling 2 5/8 and 2 1/16 standard gauge hole sizes.  I went thru a number of different tools and techniques but finally settle on using standard (that is to say, not adjustable) hole drill bits that were a little too small, and then enlarging the holes with a dremel.

 

The final effort was all aluminum.  I got some reasonably thick aluminum sheet stock from the sign shop and covered it with some vinyl that is similar to the OEM dash.  Then there were some struggle properly locating the piano hinge on it's bottom.  Everything had to be redone a couple times, especially the effort that located the hinge's axis of rotation in a way that would work.  If you look closely you can see that the piano hinge's axis of rotation is not below the plate, but about 3mm higher.  That allows the gauge plate to rotate down without actually translating down in a vertical plane.

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