Huge shout out to Scott and Taylor for letting me raid their parts bin to get this thing put together. They had a once crack free dash that developed a small crack down to the defrost vent. I am sure it will get worse but it was a start.
I picked it up Friday night and got to work on Saturday, disassembling the dash vents, vin, speaker grille.
I have used this process in the past with excellent results. Wash first with purple power, scrub with a red scotch brite pad and purple power, dry part and heat it up, heat up the can and spray several very light coats. It keeps the part from getting glossy and keeps the texture in the plastic part.
And here is where I started on Saturday morning.
Once I got the dash in I got to work on getting that bad ass cluster all built and put together. For those that have not seen it, this thing is seriously a work of art.
Getting there, First look of the dash bolted in.
By the end of the day I had a fully installed dash and console. There is a lot of little detail work to make highly modified look simple and tasteful.
This is the inside of the glovebox,
Pic is hard to tell but the OBDII port is mounted on the exterior of the box and just pokes through, the connector is for OBDII can bus interface for the race pak setup. The white wire is for data logging the AFR's. Behind that is a flush mounted USB port for programming the Race Pak dash configuration.
MIL Light is flush mounted in the top corner of the glovebox opening.
All assembled and functioning.
I also spent a bunch of time fighting with the stupid TCM controller. Long story short, the e38 ecu and OS I am running doesnt like having the VSS input straight into it, so we are having to run a TCM controller, send the VSS into the TCM controller and from there over can bus into the ECU but when I hook it up it corrupts the Can Bus so working with Jolt to see if he has a different solution.
If all goes well this thing should be ready for some tuning in the next few weeks.
Sean