NC Gauges Finally Exist!

Stormy's new gauges.

Stormy’s new gauges.

After about four years of being on the backburner and a solid eight months of development, revlimiter NC Gauges finally exist!!!!!!

You guys have no idea how long I’ve dreamed of writing that.

Well… you do. I just told how long they were in the works for…

I bought a car to make these gauges.

I bought a car to make these gauges.

I literally had to buy a car to make these gauges. I also currently own NINE NC clusters. The NC gauges are so different than NA or NB that a lot of R&D work was required. Including buying a whole car.

Not that The Stormtooper isn’t a fun car or anything. But I never planned to start a project that would require THIS.

One of the early prototypes.

One of the early prototypes.

Over the past months of ownership, I’ve worked steadily on NC gauges in between keeping other orders filled. I believe Stormy had six different sets of Warbirds installed in the cluster before I finally got things as close to perfect as possible.

Above is one of the first ones, made with old Gen2.5 materials. It was just to verify the overall cut shape and scale. The white-grey warning icons were… not optimal.

Another prototype.

Another prototype.

Allow me to vent for a minute.

The lighting in the NC cluster is super super dim. It’s insane. I’m not sure exactly why or even HOW Mazda decided to go to market with cluster lighting this dim. It’s about half the brightness of the stock NA cluster. And that one has dim incandescent bulbs. The NC has LEDs – like a dozen of them.

The warning lights are also incredibly dim. The ones in the NA and NB can easily light up an icon in the daytime. The NC ones kinda… don’t. The standard warning light formula for my NB gauges didn’t work at all for the NC. You could only see the warning icons at night or on a very cloudy day.

Such horrible lighting. Ugh.

Warning lights!

Warning lights!

Finally, I was able to get the warning lights at a good level. You can now see them in the daytime even with bright light shining straight onto the gauges. My Gen3 materials and printing process allow for very fine control of ink translucency, and I’m really happy about that. These gauges wouldn’t exist otherwise.

It only took me about a month to get the gauge layout and laser cut paths correct. That was easy. The thing that took the remaining seven months was those stupid warning lights.

But it was worth it!

NC JNC

NC JNC

JNC at night.

JNC at night.

The NC gauge cluster is also very limiting. The numerous warning lights and presence of the automatic transmission light guts in the housing means there’s almost no possibility for different designs.

Or rather, it’s very *challenging* to design around.

The NA and NB are completely open and relatively evenly lit. Anything that fits in that gauge circle will be visible in day and night, light up, and look good. The NC? Nope.

No space for logos.
No space for extra RPM at the end of the tach scale or extra speed on the speedometer.
No space for an extended redline.
Not much space for things like the words “RPM x 1000”.
And no ability to even change the lighting color.

But I was able to work around it and translate some of my designs into NC spec.

NC Sunstorm.

NC Sunstorm.

NC Spyder.

NC Spyder.

NC Stirling

NC Stirling

I mentioned the nine (9) NC clusters I currently own. There’s just… jillions of permutations of gauge for that car. Three generations of cluster (NC1, NC2, NC3), each with two transmission options (auto/stick), and four or five speed scales (150mph, 180 km/h, 240 km/h, etc) mean a lot of different designs to make and clusters to need on hand. I still need more. I only have the US MPH clusters designed at this time.

Complaining aside, I’ve been enjoying the challenge of re-imagining some of my old NA/NB gauge designs and seeing what they’d look like in the NC cluster. Some, like the Sunstorm, come across with almost no problems. Others, like the JNC, require a week of effort.

I’ve got five designs in NC format right now. That’s what I’m opening the NC section with. It’s not a ton, but five is a good starting place.

Warbird in Automatic form.

Warbird in Automatic form.

It feels so satisfying to be able to offer these gauges and get this post up. Seriously. Worth all of the effort.

Sorry for the delay, NC folks. I hope it was worth the wait. And I hope this post does a small part in explaining why it took me years to finally make gauges for your cars.

Hit the store and let the flood of NC orders commence!

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  • Rod says:

    Could it be possible to send you the whole cluster and you do the installation of the gauge faces, I would not mind paying whatever amount you think is necessary to achieve this, you have the experience and I’ll like to get it done correctly. It’ll would be for a 2013 NC3 with manual transmission. Let me know. Thanks in advance. Rod.

  • GT-Alex says:

    Your dedication is worth gold ! Good job Adam !

  • Johnny Wholesome says:

    I just added an NC2 to my trusty old NA this summer so this is great news Adam! Looking forward to seeing the km/h gauges, congrats!

  • Mark says:

    Your perseverance shows and it is what makes you the best in the business! Well done, Adam!

  • Mark says:

    Might be interested in some gauge faces for my 2016 miata šŸ˜‰ (base, manual)

    • Mark says:

      (Iā€™m different from the mark above me BTW) great work!

      Your site is part of the reason I bought one of these cars šŸ™‚

      • revlimiter says:

        I’m not sure how to say without sounding full of myself.

        I heard that SO many times at MRLS. That I was the reason people bought Miatas. I would guess 20 people or more told me that throughout the weekend.

        Each and every time I hear it, it’s the finest complement I’ve had in my whole life.

    • revlimiter says:

      ND gauges someday! Hopefully soon.

  • Dude says:

    Really interested in getting one of these. Question: is there a way to get a numerical scale for the oil pressure gauge? I love what you’ve done with the temp and gas gauges.

    • revlimiter says:

      Sure! I just don’t usually put numbers on there since the gauge is totally fake.

      But yes, I can easily put some numbers on the oil. Just place a special order. It would probably be about $10 extra.

  • Michael says:

    Well worth the wait for the NC’ers out there. The NC Spyder looks particularly appropriate to the NC styling. Now you have time to work on the NB HVAC designs!!

  • Doing an LS Swap on a NC Miata. my goal is to keep it looking as stock as possible. During the process, i learned about the fake readings of oil pressure and coolant gauges. Ever since learning this, I’ve been trying to figure out how to bring a real Oil pressure and water coolant temp gauge into cockpit. Do you have a solution?

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