This afternoon was spent working on the computer instead of out in the garage. I’ve been using lots of photos of the interior and measurements from Nitro’s dash panels as reference material. From Nitro’s panels I could get scale measurements by knowing that the small gauges are 2 1/6″ in diameter.
I’ve been creating the panels to scale in Gimp and keeping everything in separate layers so that I can move them around. I had to adjust the width a little bit because the center panel area on my dash is 17″ wide. My center panel is 16.5″ wide and I’ve been trying to keep the dials, switches, labels and lights as close to the original as possible.
Of course there’s some artistic license being used to fit the lights, dials and switches that I already have. I’ll be sure to post up the full Gimp source files once I have the panels completed.
To test out the process, I printed the first revision of the templates to see if I could tape them together and ensure that they kept their proper scale. So far.. so good.. 🙂
Of course every time you take two steps forward, you take one step back. It’s simply the joy of car building. When I taped my templates onto the dash, I realized that the 2 x 2 beam that I welded across the front dash in order to hang my steering column, is going to be in the way of some of my gauges.
One more thing to adjust 🙂
Building The BatBerry 