I purchased a '92 DA almost three years ago. I started out with a body kit, stickers and strobes. Soon I wised up and have since gone from looks to performance. You can see the work in progress at http://www.cardomain.com/id/12kredline.
I'm working on a full build up for a turbo and as usual, everyone must find a place for gauges. I'm not a fan of pillar gauges so I decided to try and morph them into my cluster. These are the steps I took:
1. Obviously, remove the cluster from the vehicle and take a good look at it.
2. I started by removing the face plate to the gauges, then I removed the Tach and water temp sensor assemblies. I turned the cluster over and removed all of the wiring and backing.
3. I knew that I wanted everything to have a "stock" look to it, so before deciding gauge placement, I went to work on the face plate.
4. Take the plate and tape across the back side of the open holes that you plan to fill, with Scotch brand "Safe Release" tape...the blus stuff.
5. Take fiberglass mat and cut out three identical pieces that will fill the open spaces in the face plate.
6. With the face plate's "front" facing you and the tape resting on the ground with the sticky side also facing you, apply a good smear of fiberglass resin onto the tape and then lay in one piece of fiberglass. Let cure and repeat with the other two pieces
7. After a days time, the resin with cure and become hard. At this time, you can peel the tape off of the fiberglass. It comes off rather well and leaves a fairly flat backing.
8. Fill in the remaining space with "Bondo". This make also take a couple coats, depending on how deep the voids are. When doing a couple layers, do the best you can to mix the bondo just like the previous batch.
9. Sand flat. You should be able to run your hand over the face plate and not be able to feel the difference in the plastic from bondo.
10. Decided placement of you gauges. I did some tricky measurements and came up with a triangle patern. The corners of this triangle, represented the centers of the guages. I moved it around till I found the spot I liked and then marked the centers of the gauges.
11. I used a 2" hole saw to make the cut outs for the gauges. The 52mm gauges require fine sanding to fit.
12. After fitting the gauges, cut out the back side of the cluster as pictured. When doing so, be careful and save any areas that connect into the factory wiring. I cut them off from the plastic backing first. All my factory wiring still plugs in, just isn't mounted to the cluster anymore.
13. I used Pipe strap from Home depot and a couple pipe clams along with a half dozen self tapping screws to hold it all together. Once bracketed and mounted, the cluster gets very sturdy.
14. Once I tried to put it all together I noticed the clear bezel touched the front of the gauges. This was easily solved by simply adding some spacers and cutting away part of the area that the bezel clipped into. (sorry no pic)
15. Install and fire up.



The interior will be together, hopefully, within two weeks.

This is how I mounted the ProfecB and TT

Night pic of the gauges. Didn't have time tonight to hook up the rest of the cluster lighting.

My AC Autotechnics S7 Tach. Not found of dash mounted tachs, but something had to give. The tach is sweet and includes water temp, oil temp and oil pressure.

 

nice. i did the same thing as well with the boost controller/turbo timer. exactly what you did too. same blac with blue screen too haha

 

looking good.

 

yeah man...thats pretty slick

 

wow great job!
i don't like the huge tach but it's fuctional.

Can you show us what material you used (where you got it from) for the new "face plate' template?

 

Looks good, DIY are fun

 

how much does that tach cost? Any links of where you got it? I have never seen that before. Your cluster looks nice as hell.