I love my tC, but one weakness that it’s always had is gauges that are impossible to read on overcast days. They’re great in sunshine, and great at night, but in between the orange LED lighting against the aluminum colored background sunk deep into a shroud just doesn’t cut it.
I’ve tried adding LED lighting in various formations, tried painting fluorescent orange dots at the numbers, even tried phosphorescing paint. I even bought aftermarket gauge faces with a white background that we advertised as being easier to see. Nothing helped.
This weekend, finally, I solved it. I painted fat black increments around the periphery at every major increment. It worked!!!
I may even go back in and put a white background (cut from a DVD label blank) on the periphery and pain the black lines on that, to hopefully make it even better.
I’m so thrilled at having solved the problem that I thought I’d pass it on.
A picture would be wonderful.
That’s pretty cool idea. On my Toyota, I could never read the radio display. I couldn’t see what station it was on, like 88.5 MHz etc. It’s one of those LCD displays. I finally figured it out. I wear polarized sun-glasses when I drive, which helps me see the road’s imperfections, dips, and rise,s better than non-polarized, but apparently the polarization in the sunglasses is oriented 90 degrees to the polarized light that comes out of the LCDs!
Anyway, I figured out that I can tilt my head enough to match up the sunglasses to the LCD, and now I can read the radio display. Ah, the trials and tribulations of modernity!
Barkydog, I don;t know that I could get a decent photo under the low lighting conditions wherein the problem occurs, and without a “before & after” it’d be hard to appreciate the difference.
Just thought i’d pass the idea along in case anyone else has such a poorly designed gauge cluster.