Custom Rotor Badges
 

I drew up this design a few years ago and these badges are the product. They are laser cut alluminum with black and white dye. I had a hell of a time getting my 8 shipped to Germany and then I got deployed, etc. So I finally manages to find enough time to get rid of the Mazda badges and clean the shit off of them so I could put these on.

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I like the design, it feels a little large in my opinion seeing the finished product on the car, but I can't say anything negative about it even at that. Nice work.

scale it down by half. remove the japanese symbols. and it would be hellaawesome.

right now its just cool man.

i love them but they are just WAAAAAAAY to big..

yea remove the Japanese symbols and scale it down a bit.

cough, GB? haha

Looks good but too large

whats wiyth the japanese symbols?

The kanji is Mazda in Japanese. The problem with making it smaller is that there is less detail. If it were 50% smaller then it would be a lot smaller than the original Mazda badge. It's actually not that much larger than the orginal badge, it just doesn't have as much emtpy space in it so it seems a lot bigger.

I really wish they were smaller id love to be able to get a set of those =//

It's really not that big, I should take a picture holding them together. It's only slightly larger than the original badges. It appears so much larger because the Mazda badges have so much empty space in them.

I agree, need to be smaller. About the size of the Efini badge methinks

How big is the Efini badge? Isn't it only a few inches across? Seems pretty tiny to me.

exactly, thats what everybody wants [to see]

it's actually not; what you have on there is actually the chinese name marketed in hong kong by mazda as the chinese *translation* (it sounds phonetically similar to mazda, and means something like you get everything you want). there're no kanji characters used for "mazda"; it was a made-up word 'cuz it sounded similar to matsuda, the founder/owner. "mazda" is now only written in katakana, and is マツダ

Pwnd. I would buy without the symbols, group buy? Reminds me of a story. My friend Yoshi was (works for Takada seat belts here now) an exchange student from Japan and he had a neighbor that had an eclipse with what the owner thought was Japanese writing. So he politely (typical japanese) tried to tell him the writing was not even Japanese and the guy got all defensive and pissy.

So every time I would see the guy I would make it a point to laugh and shake my head whenever I saw him, :lol: Also reminds me of the tattoo artist arrested in NYC for tattooing whore, etc. on women thinking they were getting philosophical and cute Japanese tats :lol:

It's not what I want to see. I always enjoyed the Mazda badges and I've never been one for debadging. So when designing a new badge I wanted something that added to the area, not subtracted from it. Just a different take on a Mazda badge.

Well thanks for the clarification! I was aware of the Chinese translation as my wife told me what it meant. She liked it because it fits me. I know there are different styles of writing in Japanese and I've never really been into it or cared, but someone told me that it was Mazda in Japanese so I took their word for it. It doesn't really bother me if it's not, the Chinese translation still works for me.

So what is the difference between kanji and katakana? I've never really been into anything Japanese so I have absolutely no clue how any of that works.

"Pwnd"? That's pretty rude and not at all relevant to this thread. This isn't a thread advertising these badges, I just wanted to show them and get people's opinion on them. Now that I see that the general concensus is that they are too large I might redo them smaller, but for now I will leave them as is. I do enjoy the writing on them even if it's not entirely accurate, so if/when I get around to getting them smaller I will just fix the lettering to be accurate.

They're neat looking, but too big for my taste as well.

smaller even sacrificing the detail itd still be baller but yeah that looks massive

I'd buy it for a paper weight.

Not trying to be rude but if it's wrong it's wrong. If you don't care then it's all good. I would make it accurate and a little smaller and then it would be perfect.

Personally I would put it this way
http://www.cnccookbook.com/img/Other...lRotorGear.JPG
it looks more aerodynamic.
I agree smaller w/o font.
It looks bad ass though, very creative.

japanese writing is composed of kanji, katakana, and hiragana. kanji are mostly straight chinese characters (some are slightly different, there're also some new made-up ones), and literally means "han character." katakana and hiragana are more like syllable characters, so once you learn it it's possible to be able to pronounce things but not understand what they mean. katakana and hiragana are uniquely japanese. most very *old things* to civilization are represented by kanji, things like people, country, animals, etc. people and place's names also are pretty much always in kanji. since mazda is really a new, made-up name, it's not written in kanji but katakana to achieve the *mazda* pronounciation. similarly, toyota is also a new made-up name (the founder's name is toyoda), so not written in kanji. honda, however, is identically named and pronounced as in soichiro honda, so is written in kanji

what you have engraved is nothing wrong or bad, but just mazda's chinese name as marketed in hong kong (maybe even singapore). i think the piece you made is very pretty itself, and i wouldn't mind having one on my desk if i didn't already have 2 old rotors as bookends. on a side note, if you showed it to someone in the far east/asia forum, you might find some interests

Group buy on a smaller version would be good!

Thanks for the info, you've been very helpful. If/when I redo this I will make it smaller and include the katakana in there instead of the kanji.

I hadn't planned on making enough of these to sell, I just wanted something unique for my car. I'm a big fan of small mods that nobody else has so I spend most of my modding time doing stuff like that.

+1 for the creativity; can't say that they suit my taste, though...Maybe if you go half the size, sans the characters, and flip them so that the rotor points downwards ( \/ as opposed to /\ ) which may flow with the body a little better (especially in the front).

again though, +1 for the creativity and doing what you want.