Fabio421

Today I finally pulled my pod and guage cluster to give it a face lift. Here are the pics and also a few questions. In the first pic. Please note the black mark on the side of the guage. This will help to make sure you put the needle back in the exact location it was in before disassembly. The guage mfgr. tells you that needle removal is not required, this is not true. At least with SpeedHut guages. The two sided tape wasn't strong enough to hold the stainless bezels into the contour required on our cluster so I resorted to super glue. If you are installing these guages, you will also need to notch out the white plastic near one of the guages to allow clearance for the plug that goes to each guage face.
My question to all who have done this mod is this. Do I need to remove or disconnect my stock orange guage illumination light now? I need to order another one if it stays, so just hooking it up and checking isn't an option right now.
Thanks. Enjoy. I have more detailed pics if anyone needs them.

Chuck Schreiber

Flabio,

Gauges look awesome there buddy!

Rod Underwood

That looks great.

I'm redoing my interior and while I have the pod off, I'd like to upgrade. Can you post where you got it and other details or pm me a phone number, so we can talk, or.... ;-)

Thanks.
Rod

fbarnhill

Wow, that looks great I would love to do this to mine. Can you tell us where you got the kit and how much?

Thanks,
Frank Barnhill
79 Euro

Rod Underwood

[QUOTE=fbarnhill]Wow, that looks great I would love to do this to mine. Can you tell us where you got the kit and how much?

Thanks,
Frank Barnhill
79 Euro[/QUOTE

Frank, it looks like you and I are almost always on the same page. Maybe we can exchange photos of our finished works.

Rod

Fabio421

The bezel came from custombezels.com and was $20. The white face EL guages are from speedhut.com. and were about $90. I hope this helps.

whitefox

That looks great!

fbarnhill

Thanks Fabio

I am putting this on my list after the cv joints. I am eventually going to remove the dash and redo the leather.
Rod, sounds like we have some similar interest. Since you are already in Indiana, are you going to do the drivers ed?
My shark is a 79 Euro, lite blue metalic with 38K miles. I like the older clean body lines of the origionals. However, I have seen some s4's and gt's lately that makes me seriously quesiton my beliefs.
I will post some pictures as soon as I finish my engine work this next weekend.

Thanks,
Frank Barnhill
79 Euro

checkmate1996

First, good idea on the marking the needle, I didn't and it caused a lot of pain when you have to take everything apart again...

I did this mod with reverse indiglo using the speedhut gauges about a year a go...I agree the double sided tape is lame..but it did work for me...I just cut it up in many small pieces to get the most area..super glue would probably work too.

Bezels look great! I might have to take the pod apart just to do them!!

Fabio421

I must confess. I didn't think of how to mark the needles until I got to the last guage. The double sided tape works great for the guages. It was the bezel where I found it to be a problem. The bezel that I used is not that wide, so you have a limited area to install the tape. And the guages are set into the housing in a concave shape so the bezel must also follow this shape. It didn't want to stay that way with the two sided tape.

You can find these guage faces a little cheaper on ebay but I dodn't know if the quality is as good.

For those of you who are planning on doing this mod. The clear plastic face is glued in place. There are some black plastic tab shaped objects at the bottom, these don't hold it in so don't waste your time prying on them. Just run a sharp razor knife between the black plastic of the housing and the clear plastic of the cover and it will seperate. Glue back together when finished.

Mark

Nice job, Fab!

The other "trick" I have used in the past for 'needle marking'....I take a digital pic of the gauges prior to taking them apart - then just print it out for reference.

Fabio421

Great idea Mark. That will get you pretty close. I actually did take pics of the cluster before I took the pod apart, so I will be able to double check my marks. I took the pics for a refference as to where each pod switch is supposed to go. But I can also use the pic for the needles. Thanks for the tip.

Rod Underwood

How does the lighting work. I assume you may have them installed by now. Can you post images of the gauges at night? This would be a way to take care of woefully inadequate gauge lighting. I hope!!!.

Rod

SwayBar

I really like the visibility of the black on white; looks very nice and functional!

whitefox

Do they come in a 180 MPH guage?