| I was searching Nate (NoVA)'s post history to find out what happened to his previous Z and came across this post where he and others were defending zthirtytwo that they should be supported over Khalid for copying zthirtytwo's din panel. So lets put this into a little more perspective. Email from zthirtytwo... ==========
Hi Gary,
My name is James Caro and I own ZThirtyTwo. We have been making gauge faces for 300zx's for a little while now and we had a few customer request a 200mph version. One customer had your conversion so we went ahead and made a speedo face based off of your design. I am sorry we didn't contact you prior to doing this and I do hope its okay with you. We have posted pictures of the gauge faces and we are getting interest in them. I wanted to see if you would be interested in working together to offer your conversion to our customers. Some people are not aware of your set up and we would love to make it easier for them to connect with you. Would this be something you would be interested in? If you have a set price and information we can post it on our Facebook page as well as our website.
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Obviously someone sent ZThirtyTwo one of my 200 mph gauge faces to be copied. I'm not terribly upset about it because like eveything else around here, it's bound to happen and it's not an exact copy anyway. Also the fact that you can sell them all day long but if you can't provide the support for them then what's the point other than trying to make a buck. On another related note, people make it seem so simple to remove the gauge needles and put them back on. The Z32 gauges are very sensitive. Whenever you remove the needles and put them back on you are playing a game of chance. In more cases than not, either the gauge will be damaged or the needles will be out of calibration. I've done it myself in the past but now I've developed a special process and have even created special tools to be able to remove the gauge needles and put them back on without damaging the gauges or making them out of calibration. People on ZThirtyTwo's facebook page were asking how to calibrate the gauges after installing their gauge faces. ZThirtyTwo put a link on their page to a post on the Australian 300zx club's wesite where someone shows how they recalibrated a speedometer gauge. All I can say is, that info is completely ridiculous and the process they do to recalibrate the gauge is completely unnecessary. It also only applies to 1990 and 1991 USA gauges. My process of calibrating the gauge after installing a 200 mph gauge face requires no change or replacement of any of the gauge components. Your gauge is exactly as it was before, just recalibrated. And before anyone ask, no, I will not share this info. It's part of my business and I consider it proprietary information. For whatever reason, gauge clusters in some of the other countries used the same 1990 style gauges over a longer period of time than in the USA. That post on the Australian 300zx club's wesite (God forbid anyone really try that) only applies to USA 1990 and 1991 gauge clusters. ZThirtyTwo advertises their 200 mph gauge as being compatible with 1990-1994 gauge clusters? Really? Why not 1995 and 1996 then? Because like a lot of things that people hastily copy and put out there for sale, they don't really know anything about what they're selling. The fact is, 1990 and 1991 USA gauge clusters are the only ones that these gauge face copies will work with. 1992-1996 speedometer gauges are basically the same but different than 1990 and 91. They are also not able to be recalibrated in any practical manor. An additional interface is required that adds an aditional $100 to the cost of trying to do this mod. Anyway, I just thought I'd put this out there as an FYI and as a warning to anyone thinking about doing this mod before you get your feet in to deep. As far as ZThirtyTwo, no I'm not interested in partnering with you and yes, you should have asked first. :)
 
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