If you are doing Dakota gauges, switch over to relayed switches, and painless style wiring with a modern fuse box, you will NOT regret it.
Its a simple and inexpensive venture.
As for the gauges, I used the Dakotas and you can do better for less money, or much better for the same money, I don't use aluminum its too expensive and hard to work with, and unforgiving, use plastic, I trace out the factory bezels and cut them out with the jeg saw, tune them up with the bench sander, drill the mounting holes, them screw it to a piece of wood, now drill all the gauge holes (much easier to work with on the wood ), any decal shop will make you all the decals you want for pennies, so if you want your bezel to say "lights, wipers, high low, left right, wash, you just get the decals made up in the color font size you want..
After its all cut, fit and ready to go, spray it the color you want, apply decals, and clear over them, and your done, and you do the same for the radio, hockey stick, and lower covers if you don't have AC...
Sounds like a lot of work now that I typed it out, but its really not, you are working with plastic and it comes awesome, feels like you accomplished something when you are done. And its one of a kind..
I use speed hut gauges, they make autometer look stupid, made in usa, lifetime warranty, and you can customize them to what you want, and I mean everything, you can have the face any color, and logo, any words, and numbers, dials, pins, pointers, anything you can think of. The set we are doing in the dude truck has the dude logo on them and that truck is sublime green so the gauges match it, they look really cool, I think he spent $650 total for all the gauges... I seen a speedometer in a corvette from speed hut the speedo said "slow the **** down" on it, lol pretty cool.
http://www.speedhut.com/kit/G338-5K...et---Speedometer-Gauge-Speedhut-160mph-(TSHB)
