A couple of months ago, at one of Murray Pfaff's infamous Detroit hot rod industry gatherings, aka "Rears & Gears", our boy, Steve Barth won the Grand Prize; a set of custom gauges from Auto Meter! (lucky bastard) Barth scheduled a day trip to design his gauges, even though I'm no effin morning person, I got invited along to the bucolic town of Sycamore, IL. The burg has a kind of a Mayberry feel to it. Time seems to be frozen in a place, where parking meters cost 10cents for 2 hours & a parking ticket is only a buck! That's pretty cool! Auto Meter's manufacturing plant is only a couple of doors down from their old Sales Office, but these buildings have been a part of Sycamore's fabric forever. Brett took us on a quick tour of the plant, where he showed us their hi-tech inventory control system(s), the work stations that the gauge assembly teams designed themselves, & some top secret circuit board mfg technology. AM's HQ is in one of the several buildings that they've worked to restored in downtown Sycamore. The latest project was turning the old depot into a place for local non-profit groups. Joe runs the Auto Meter Custom Shop's Design team, which has its own webpage on the AM site. He has loaded it with a remarkable supply of design components that can make up TENS OF THOUSANDS of unique combinations for a one-of-a-kind package. Joe & Steve labored over the "look" he wanted for his '55 Chevy 1st Series truck dash. Of course, they suffered with a rude, running commentary from Brett & me. My only regret is that we never really got the complete story behind the SophistiCat painting that adorns the end of the building where these screwballs sit... The final product: Now that Steve has collected most of the parts needed to build his 55, we've scheduled it for a fall start. We will of course be posting a proper build thread as we go.
Neat. I know that burg... just a couple of shifts up the road from DeKalb and NIU, my old alma matter. Whether it's gauges or flying DeKalb corn hats, you can't go wrong there! LOL. Gary
Nice, I've been looking into a set of their gauges for my truck and this pushes me more in that direction.
The Jalopy Journal
