About Us
You might be wondering why I would even think of offering a product like this. Well, there are some times I ask myself the same question.This all started in early 2002. Being the owner of a 1995 Thunderbird LX, I was looking around for a few things to do to it. I saw pictures of cars like mine with different gauge faces. They looked pretty much like the stock ones, just in white. I liked the look, although my wife said it must be a "guy thing" and I started to investigate how much it would cost me to swap mine out. I found some instructions that had been posted on a couple web sites and determined that I could do that. It didn't look very hard. Then I found the pricing of some of them. Whoa! And these were standard off the shelf type items, and they wanted over $100 for them. Well, that certainly wasn't going to do.
Being a Mechanical Engineer (ME '93 UMR) and a cheapskate, I decided that I could design/fabricate something on my own. I was able to pull a set of gauge faces out of a 1993 Cougar that I found in the junkyard. I used those faces to make my prototype set, which was nothing more than an inverse (black on white) set of faces. Originally, I used image software to manipulate the colors of the faces. But my limited image editing software experience left the result rather uninspiring. I had much more experience with CAD software, so I decided to draw the gauge faces. Well, for me, this worked out quite well. I had much better control over the look of the faces with the CAD software. The first few prototype sets that I made were white faced versions of the factory ones. They looked pretty good during the day, but at night....well, let's just say that the results were ...how do you say it...terrible. There was a great learning curve to figure out how to get favorable results at night. But, the problem was solved and I have moved on.
I had noticed that the Bullitt Mustang had a different set of gauge faces in them from the factory. These were pretty cool in the fact that they mimicked the look of the older 60's Mustangs. So I decided that since I had seen other people adapting Mustang parts to work on their Thunderbirds & Cougars, why not make a set of gauge faces that would make their's look like the Bullitt Mustang's? Thus the Bullitt style was born.
At first, they were just white faced only, and then people started to ask for black faced gauges in the same style. Well, a little experimentation, and the black faced gauge faces were ready to be offered.
Then people with 1997 Thunderbirds and Cougars started to inquire if I could make faces for their cars. Once again, I went through development of the new faces.
This was all fine and dandy for a while, but then in about mid 2003, I decided I wanted to make a style of faces that would be nice and easy to read. This is the origin of the large text style.
As I would start to get feedback from people who had received gauge faces from me, I noticed that there were a lot of people who would like these gauge faces for other vehicles other than the T-Birds and Cougars.
A coworker asked me if I would be interested in making a set of faces for his 1985 Mustang GT. After looking around for quite a while, I noticed that there didn't seem to be anyone out there that made gauge faces for the 1979-1986 Fox Body Mustangs. These would be applicable with a lot of cars, because often the cars built on the same Fox platform utilized the same parts, like instrument clusters.
Also, since the 1997 Thunderbird and Cougar instrument cluster is basically a Taurus/Sable cluster, those will work (with a little alteration to the idiot lights) for the 1996 and up Taurus and Sables. The Taurus SHO of that era is a different beast, but I have that all taken care of.
I have been contacted on numerous occasions to make faces for vehicles that I did not offer at the time. Many times, I can get my hands on a cluster and make the set of faces that were requested. I have quite the stack of clusters on the shelf. I have even done some sets in which I never see the cluster, but instead, I receive high quality scans of the factory faces.
Well, if you read all of that, congratulations. Now you have a pretty good idea of how I got into this. Sometimes it's just interesting to read about a person's history.
Many Thanks
Also, there is a huge "Thank You" that I have to put out there to my wife and daughter. Without them, I certainly wouldn't be where I am now. My wife was a little skeptical at first, but after a while, she has become an integral part of the entire process. My daughter likes to help me with the assembly and the trimming of the gauge faces and it seems like it is the highlight of her evenings. For all of the support and help that they give me, I have to give them a giant "Thank You".