Miata Mods

I opted for a mildly modified Version 10AE. The blue was a little too bright for my taste, so I had Adam change it to the gray on the Delta gauges. Now comes the needle color quandary, the photo above shows what it will look like if I leave them alone, hover over it and see what it would look like if I do some extra work.

For those of you who would like your own eye candy gauges for your Miata, now is the time, every Thanksgiving week Adam runs a big sale called Sharksgiving Sale (named for his car Sharka.) All stock gauges (no custom work) are down to $99 instead of the regular $129. Other stuff is on sale too, so forget that cheap Black Friday TV, get your RevLimiter on.

Bad news for me was that my gauges weren’t sale eligible, but the good news is that I got my order in before the sale, because before the sale it was a 2 week wait for orders, now it is 5 to 8 weeks…

I’ve got a RevLimiter problem.

When I bought the CTBNL a couple of years ago, it came with some of Adam’s stuff. The previous owner (Hi David) had one of his GarageStar oil caps with the Prototipo2 logo already on the car and he also gave me 3 of the small Prototipo2 badges that he hadn’t used. For a while I considered using them as fender badges, ALA BMW, but never did. One of them would made a perfect replacement for the Mazda logo on the trunk lid, but I never did that until just recently, when my Fairy Godfather gifted me with the larger matching front badge.

When it came to brightening up the wheels a little I bought some Wheel Center Cap Inserts from the RevLimiter Store in the same Prototipo2 style.

But this RevLimiter problem is not new. I’ve wanted a set of his gauge faces for at least the last decade, but never could talk myself into spending the $150 entry fee. That problem has been recently solved because I sold my retirement watch for almost the exact amount needed to buy a set of RevLimiter gauges.

The money was not the only problem though, which style to pick is arguably the harder one to solve. For the NB (99-05) car I have, there are 32 different styles to choose from. It is even worse for the NA (90-97), as there are 41 stock styles available. To make matters worse he does custom work too, everything from minor color changes to complete custom for a price. I think I have narrowed my choices down to three styles, the 10AE, the Delta and the Apollo.

I like the 10AE because it has some blue in it to bring inside the stripe color, but the best thing is, it doesn’t require moving the high beam light from it’s stock location. In almost all the other custom gauge faces the high beam indicator light is moved to the location of the current cruise control light and for me, that light is mostly blocked by the steering wheel, and not too noticeable.

The Delta does move the the high beam light, but the color scheme is better suited to the black and silver interior of the car. I think I would have him do a bit of custom work and remove the inside arc of KPH numbers on the speedometer.

The thing with these two gauge styles is I think they both look best with the white needles as shown on his website because of their predominately black faces. White needles where stock only on the 1999-2000 models, while the 2001-2005 (mine is a 2002) has red needles. Hover over the above images for a second to see what they look like with red needles.

When I changed out the gauge faces in my old ’95 Miata the stock faces were were black with white needles. When I changed to white gauge faces, I scraped the white paint off the needles and painted them red. I guess I could do the same this time, in the opposite direction, but I’d rather not.

Of course if I’m willing to live with the relocated high beam indicator light, I could possibly go with the Apollo, which doesn’t look too bad with the red needles. Once again hover over the images to see a mock up.