A custom gauge dial is the one part of an instrument everybody looks at and almost nobody can buy off a shelf. We design and screen gauge dials to order, one car at a time, in the same shop that has been restoring instruments on Emerson Street since 1957.
Custom gauge dials are not a reprint of the factory artwork. That is restoration, and we do that too. This is the other thing: a dial built to your specification, in your colours, with your fonts, your numerals, your logo, or a finish that never existed on any production car.
What we can change on a gauge dial
Effectively everything on the face of the instrument. Color, across the dial or picked out on individual markings. Fonts and numeral styles. Logos and lettering. Scales and redlines. Textures, including three dimensional dials with real depth rather than a printed suggestion of it. A single theme carried across a whole set, so the tachometer, speedometer and the smaller gauges read as one design rather than five separate decisions.
We can stay in the same lane as the original if you want a dial nobody would question, or we can go somewhere the factory never would, whatever fits best for your car or outlaw.
Which cars we build custom gauge dials for
Porsche is the bulk of this work. The models we build for most often are the 964, 993, 996, 997 and 991, the Boxster, Cayman and 718, and the Macan and Cayenne. That is where the volume is, and it is why this page leads with it.
It is not the limit of it. We make custom dials for any car we work on, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz among them. The rule is simple: if we repair or restore it, we can customize it.
One distinction is worth knowing before you ask, because it changes the shape of the job rather than whether we can do it. Our pre-made custom dials are a plastic-era product, which is what makes a straightforward dial swap possible on the modern cars. On an older instrument a custom dial is usually one part of a larger bespoke piece of work rather than a thing on its own: the dial alongside new pointers, a bezel, chrome or gold caps, done together on the bench. Both are work we do. Which one your car needs depends on what is in the dashboard, and that is what the photographs in your inquiry tell us.
How a custom dial job works
It starts with a conversation rather than a catalogue. Tell us the car, which gauges you want done, and what you have in mind, and send a photograph of what is in the dashboard now. From that we can tell you what is possible, what we would do differently, and what it will cost.
The design is done entirely in house, which is the part that matters. We are not sending your idea out to a printer and hoping. It means you can specify every detail of what appears on the dial, change your mind halfway through, and see it before it is made.
Gauge dials are also known as gauge faces, and people search for both. Whichever you call them, it is the same part and the same work.
Dials and the rest of the instrument
A custom gauge dial usually arrives with company. Pointers in a colour that suits the new dial, bezels, chrome or gold caps, and a change of finish are all part of the same conversation, and all of it is work we do on the bench here. That side of it lives with our restoration, repair and customization service, because it is work done to an instrument rather than a thing you pick from a list.
If you want finished instruments you can simply buy and fit, we build and sell a small range of those too. See gauges for sale for the Porsche 356 and 914 triple combination gauges, the 356 electric tachometer and the reproduction 356 clock.
Tell us what you want
Send the car, the gauges and a photograph of what is in the dashboard now. Photographs tell us more than anything you can write, and they are what decide whether your car wants a dial on its own or a bespoke job around one. We come back with questions or a quote, usually within a working day.