Let me show you a way to restore a speedometer face plate. I had a working speedometer in my 1940 truck, but all parts where pretty rusted. If you have a car with rust patina, a rusted speedometer may look nice. But if you plan to paint your car during restoration, you have to replace or restore the speedometer to have a consistent appearence of your car.
A restored or NOS speedometer for my truck is 800$-1000$. That was way to high for my budget. I decided to try a digital restoration on the PC to replace the original rusted face plate of the speedometer. The plan is to scan the original face plate in a high resolution, edit the picture with GIMP and four color print the result or do a painting stencil of it.
I used 600×600 DPI scan resolution and after several hours with GIMP, this is what the face plate look like now:
old vs new
