The seat cover is made and the seat is upholstered, I just need to pick it up. I turned my attention to the gauges, as I think it will be nice to have a tach while I ride. I'm blatantly ripping off Industrial Cafe's idea of using LED rings to backlight the gauges. I ordered my rings a couple weeks ago, and am still waiting for them to arrive from China. In the meantime I cracked open the gauges, and went to work.
Here you can see all of the disassembled bits, and I've started sanding off the paint on the tach:
The gauge faceplate itself is translucent blue/green plastic. There's a layer of white paint, then a second layer of green paint that lets the white letters and tick marks show through. Both layers of paint were sanded off to get to the bare plastic.
My initial idea was to have my friend cut out some vinyl overlays that I can just stick on to the gauges:
Unfortunately, we had a limited amount of time and his vinyl cutter was freaking out at my DXF files, so the cutting wasn't complete, quite a few lines were missing, which made it not work out so well. So I went back to using my previous design printed off on paper. I think they look good.
I ripped out the tach element from the Ninja gauges. It should be a perfect fit inside of the stock tach bucket, so one that gets wired up I'll have an electronic tach. I need to figure out a way to plug the tach hole in the valve cover since I'll no longer need the tach cable.
On a sidenote, I noticed the front tire went completely flat. It appears that the tube is leaking somewhere around the valve stem. I'll be taking the wheel back to the Honda dealership to have them take care of it. I've had good experiences with them in the past so here's hoping they take responsibility for it, since the bike has done nothing but sit ever since the wheel was installed.
I'm leaving town again at the end of this week so we'll see if I actually get to take it for a ride before I leave.
