I am repainting the speedometer and will have to repaint the numbers. They are painted on top of indents of the sheet metal. Any tip on how to do this? I have tried acryclic markers and a small brush and it was all a fail. At the factory they must have used a small jig or something. The numbers look hand drawn but I cant imagine them doing this with a brush on scale. .
They probably did a sponge type painting on it originally. locate the part and press the sponge down on it to transfer paint. Like this kind of thing.
You not repainting those. I think you have two options- get a used speedometer face or try and find a graphics place to make a decal overlay for you
They used rubber rollers to apply paint. (machine) (I worked in a metal shop that made street signs, same principle, but much bigger application) You could try it, and if it doesn't work go with vinyl graphics as CJay suggested. Hand held rubber roller, sheet of glass (buy a cheap photo frame) pour a small amount of paint on the glass, roll into it, then roll on a clean spot to get a even thin coting on the roller, then roll over the face and the numbers, with very light pressure. (if the face is perfectly flat) Might take you a few tries to get it the feel for it. Like these https://tinyurl.com/4fbrd65c
I'm fairly sure that's special luminescent paint. I tried doing it with regular paint and it looked dead.
It's not exactly refrigerator white but it's not luminescent either. Cheapest answer is just get another speedo face and swap it out. The needle comes off very easily
Many interesting ideas here... I will at least try to fix it first. Yes me repainting this is not realistic at least... I don't think decals is the way to go on this 3D surface actually though. A lot of the stock look (which is a very nice look) seems to come from how the ink extends down the edges of the outdents. Filling in just the tops of the numbers with acrylic marker sort of could look okey, but the numbers looked very thin and said. As there are outdents to use as guides I bet there are techniques that can be used to fix this without having a bachelors of arts. Aaa, also interesting idea! The thing is though that the original paint lays on top of the outdents, but extends all down to the base of the speedometer backing plate. So if they used a roller they must have pressed really hard on it. And that must be hard to do with a roller without smudging paint everywhere. So given how the paint/ink extends down to the base, it looks more realistic to me that they used some sort of pad printing on my speedometer. Still worth trying though. I am thinking that also a flat rubber pad that is spraypainted or so might work? Another idea is to cast the front in RTV and then use that as a kind of stamp. That is a good point, a something a bit flourescent might look good there.
I looked at the image of the painted side and see that now. That makes me think it was silk screen printed white over the black. Screen printing lends to good registration and fine line breaks. On my cars '64 and '68, the paint is direct on top of raised letters.
On that vehicle the symbols only seem to be painted on the top of the raised letters. Also the symbols seem to have a flat top. On the electra the base of the raised numbers is about 1.2 mm wide. However, the white paint is 1.6 mm wide. Those extra 0.4 mm is paint extending down the sides of the numbers bareley extending on the speedometer base. Quiet a tricky thing to paint Yesterday I tried with some small sponges I cut out. Didnt work for me. This was a little trickier than I thought.
You need to find one of those guys that paints pictures on a grain of rice and have him repaint them.
Hehe maybe. Actually called a tattoo artist nearby today, he didn't want to do this but he will ask around about it. Also ordered some silicone for mold casting yesterday. I will do some sort of casts of the numbers and experiment a little, see what happens. It is fun to experiment no matter what.
If that was a case the decision would have been simple. Here it is more like 200 USD after international shipping and 3 weeks+ of waiting.
