i know this isn't reall audio, but it invloves some of the smae components as a custom install...... since they don't make that nice clean bezel for the ludes, i need to find another way to mount a few more guages, i was thing of using small peices of PVC for the pod, and molding them into my dash(i have a removeable center peice in my dash), and the recovering it in black vinyl to make it look good, i want to add EGT, AIT, and oil temp.... and one got any help on this?

 

Boosted... we do a lot of custom fabrication so here I go. (along with this instruction, use good judgement)
Carefully remove the center piece. Tape the whole thing neatly and thinnly with blue masking tape. Tape your gauges neatly and follow the contours with blue tape. Cut the dash piece to fit and angle the gauges as desired. Hot glue the gauges onto the center piece from the back. Wrap grill cloth (you can buy some from stereo shops) over the entire piece. Make sure it tightly fitted and the edges aren't wrinkled. Hot glue the back edges (you can hot glue it right over the top of the grill cloth) and press it down onto the plastic w/like the handle of a screw driver. Mix a little hardener (use a seperate container like a 16oz Pepsi bottle with the top cut off) into fiberglass resin (they sell resin in a can and fiberglass in sheets at like Autozone) and spread it over the grill cloth. Let it harden (it won't get really hard because the material doesn't soak up resin very well but this material is important because it stretches and its thin) Lay a thin layer of fiberglass onto the dash piece and apply resin on top. Don't worry about overhang because you can cut it off after it hardens. Repeat this step once more to give it some rigidity. After it dries, trim where necessary and carefully remove the fiberglass piece from the dash piece. You should have something that resembles the dash of like a 3000GT or something. Cut the holes out for the gauge faces and refit the fiberglass pc onto the dash pc. Cut the excess overhang off. Sand the piece to get a fairly smooth finish and smooth edges. Now its Bondo time. Use body filler w/a little bit of hardener and smooth it onto the surface. Technically body filler takes 3 days to fully dry so just wait. It'll be worth it. Now sand the bondo to desired contour. If there's little tiny pits, don't worry about it. If you need to, Bondo the pits. Now your ready to vinyl. This is the tough part. Spray on contact glue (big chunks will show so spray evenly) onto the fiberglass piece and stretch the vinyl over it. Wear some heat resistant gloves (like Mechanix wear stuff) use a heat gun as necessary (be careful not to melt or leave burn marks on the vinyl). Glue the edge of the vinyl underneath the dash piece and cut excess material off. Cut the vinyl along the gauge faces by making pie cuts. Don't cut right to the edge because you have to wrap it inwards and it may show. Just trim off the vinyl where the snaps are and you're pretty much finished. It'll be a tight fit but snap it back in and you're done. There's your custom fiberglass gauge pod. If you wanna make money off it, before you vinyl it, wrap it in aluminum foil and make a mold. Then you can match interior colors and sell it on ebay. This process can be used to make a lot of different things like custom A-pillers w/like a VAFC molded in or custom kick panels, etc. If you decide to do this, tell me how it turned out. Good luck! By the way, we'd charge about $400 or so at our shop to do a job like this. Thats money in your pocket.

 

whoa, good info, thanks bro

 

I got a big headache from reading that, but good info .

 

Damn these prelude guys are thorough

Did you type that whole thing?