You can get oops at walmart. Its in the home improvement area with the glue and paint. It comes in a red and white can that opens like lighter fluid.

You don't want any black in there. I'd try using flat mat clear stensils from walmart. you can get them in the back in the craft department. Just stick them somewhere behind the gauges with the shiny side towards the EL and the bumpy side towards the gauges. It should diffuse the light enough to make it appear smooth. It works with LEDs.





Here's some examples of how i did a couple of LED clusters. It might help you in making yours.





















Btw.. did you buy EL tape or EL string?



It looks like your gauges are pretty clear, so you may want to try putting the EL at the bottom of the gauges and then a layer of stensil right under the gauges. It would look white durring the day, but the ridges on the flat side would gather the light from the EL at night.

To take care of the looking white problem, you could try getting some gel to put behind it.

example: http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cf...tnumber=244-119

It seems pretty elaborate, but I'll tell you for a fact that stensil works very well as a diffusion material, and the stage lighting gels are cheap, and work well.

 

dtn, once again, you ARE the man. thank you for putting fourth your time to post that up. That's an excellent idea to use the stage lighting to use for diffusion so it doesn't look like it's all messy.

i bought the el string! it should be coming within this week since it's from the UK! and it would look BADASS with the blue on white film during the day.

1. Oops the paint out from the back lines.
2. Cut stencil material.
3. Put stage lighting in.
4. El string on back.
5. Red LED's for needles.

Thanks!

 

Ok I got the stuff shipped! The stuff from London came so quick! Ok, I have a HUGE sheet of this Seductive Blue Gel. It's just a thin sheet of plastic. If anyone wants some I can send some to you just give me dimensions. I'll only be needing a cutout of the gauges. I will post that in the For Sale thread and you can call out.

Next, this EL String looks great quality and there's 4 feet of it to wrap around all of the gauges if I use the space wisely. I don't have a photo unfortunately because I don't have a compatable camera for mac yet. It looks like it has a distributor. Here's a webcam pic:

it says 4-pin, but there's black and red wire coming into and out from the distributor. is the 4-pin socket really necessary or can i cut that away before the distributor so the black and red remain?

I tested it out with a 12V RC car battery charger, looks good but i definitely won't see results without making the faces clear. i'm on that right now.

 

chop those 4 pin harnesses off so all you have are a red and black wire coming out of the box. they are only for hookups inside a computer case.

 

That's why I was saying you might want to buy a better inverter (the box). They all work the same. Just meant for different purposes. Computers run on a regulated 12V power supply. Our car spikes to 14.6V when charging. I dont know how long your inverter will last. It may last forever though.

When you put it all together, make sure you leave the connections outside of the cluster so the inverter can be swapped later with a different model if needed.



I was reading in the shout box you were not getting alot of light through the gel. Keep in mind that this will only be used at night. Also remember that different Gels have different properties. The lighter the color the more you can take advantage of the green in the EL glow to make it brighter. It might be that a good color would be a pale blue or

http://www.prolightingsupplies.com/gelsheets.php

910, 847, 810, 835 would be my choices

 

diffusion? and the inverter to up the amps on that to be a lot brighter? you might be right, but the El tape won't just work a little better ey?

yeah the gel is pretty dark but i need it to spread the light a little bit. i think i will use it here is a pic, my lamp behind it:



i cleared out the back just like you did dtn! works great. i made sure to keep the red, green and blue colors that were for other signs. took me like 1.5/2 hours. also, the F2 logo will be lit just like i'd hope it could be cleared!

found this:

 

those gauges are really sharp. looks good. i would try doing it without the gel though, since you already have blue light.

 

Yeah, the gel was just for a daytime color and nighttime filtering effect. It does not replace diffusion. What I meant by diffusion was something to disperse the light so you cannot see where it's comming from. Put it down deeper so it gathers light from the EL rope and sends it off everywhere. The stensil material works wonders on sending the light from LEDs everywhere. If you put it up higher, like right under your filter and turned it rough side down, it would gather light from every direction and make the lines from the rope indistinguishable



This is the stuff I am talking about. These LEDs are mounted directly to the flat side of the stensil. You can see how it distributes the light, notice how much bigger the single LEDs appear then the needle cluster?





The idea behind diffusion is you don't have to be a perfectionist. You can put just a wad of EL string at the base of the cluster, then some diffusion between it and the gauges.

 

if you have 4 feet of the stuff you shouldnt need any diffusion, especially since el material already distributes light evenly. just wrap it all over the place behind the clear gauge pieces in the cluster and you should be fine.

 

I just spoke to my dad, he's a photographer with about 40 years experience. He says you may be able to use the gel. One side is made of plastic and the other side has the gel. Scrub the plastic side with steel wool and it should jack it up enough to diffuse it. If it does not, then you can always buy a lighter color gel and scrub multiple layers with steel wool to get the desired effect. That's how he used to get the same effect on the edges of photographs before digital photography and photoshop came around.

Tibby01: the problem with that is the gauges are transparent rather then opaque like the stockers. You can see the individual strands behind the gauges.