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I have designed the gauge faces I want and did up a laminate of them-laser on paper-laser on transparancy and transparancy over the top.
I used 3m 77 sparay adheasive but it still looks like water droplets between the two clear layers. Any ideas on how to glue 2 clear pieces of plastic together and not have it show or haze.
Gauges are modelled after 1940-42 criss craft boat gauges The needles are red instead of white so they will glow and the yellow part should be back lit with blue blacked out from behind so it does not show when lit. Also both counter clockwise like some of the eary 30s guages as well as some of the criss craft gauges of the era. Both have been rewired and calibrated with frequency generator and scope) to work counterclockwise and be accurate. The small gauges will be much easier.
Dale

You might look into laminating them just like your teachers used to do in school. Might check out some of the office supply places to see if they can do it.

A bigger problem would be the sun-fastness of the dials you printed. I would think that they would fad badly in the sun. You might try converting them to a format you could take to one of the drug stores (CVS and such) and print them off on photo paper. That might be a bit more colorfast.

Laminating is a good idea. Also, if you print them with a printer using pigment ink you will have very little fading. These printers include the Epson Professional printers as well as Canon wide format printers. Dye inks and laser printers can fade pretty fast, sometimes in just a matter of months. Of course, any ink or paint will fade some over time.

I forgot to post this link. I've been in the photography business for 40 years. This guy literally wrote the book on image fading. He is the world standard for lightfastness of imaging processes. If you need to know what printer to use you can see the results here.http://www.wilhelm-research.com

You can buy adhesive laminating plastic sheets. I made some wheel centercap emblems years ago. I started out with inket adhesive printable plastic sheets. I printed on the sheets then put the adhesive laminate sheet over the top and cut 'em out. Worked great until a few months went by and the ink started to fade. I just peeled the old ones off and put new one on. I made quite a few. I understand now that the Kodak inkjet printers use pigments instead of inks, so they should be colorfast. At least they advertise them as such.

Yes, any office supply store will have laminating sheets. Just use pigment ink to print the dial.

Thanks for the replies, For the small gauges they look like they will fit on a standard credit card blank so I should be able to fit them on to poly carbonate blanks and run them through a dye sub printer-( I am a service tech for a company that makes does embossing and card manufacturing).
Laminating may work if I can keep the sheets perfectly aligned.
Thanks
Dale