FlyingShawn

Hey all, it’s been a while since I’ve posted (a lot of life has happened), but I thought you’d all enjoy seeing two extremely UNIQUE upgrades I’ve made to my 996’s interior over the last couple of years!

Head unit:

I “daily” my 996 on my once-a-week commute down to DC for work and around town while I’m there, frequently in heavy traffic, so when I decided to replace the cheap, barely functional double-din a previous owner had installed I felt strongly that I needed a solution for Waze that’d be visible without taking my eyes off the road. Inspired by the factory floating screen in my ‘18 Audi A4, I embarked on many hours of research and found that Pioneer had started building a line of head units where the screen and “brain” are separated by a cable. It was NOT a cheap install and required significant, permanent alterations to the dashboard, but a local custom shop was able to integrate it into my car in a spectacular fashion!
Pioneer DMH-WC6600NEX


At first glance it looks like it’d be a distraction from the road, but I honestly feel having such a large display for Android Auto/Waze in my peripheral vision has made a significant improvement to my safety in rush-hour DC traffic!

“Why not just use your phone like a normal person?” I’ve had pretty severe OLED burn-in issues on a previous phone using Waze on regular long drives, plus the wear-and-tear on the battery can be really detrimental. Wireless Android Auto still uses a decent amount of juice, but not nearly as much as navigating and having my phone on high brightness all the time.

Coat hangers:

Maybe this is a sacrilegious idea over in Stuttgart, but I’d actually like to use the seatback coat hooks in my 996 to carry clothes! After a long time using a jerry-rigged zip-tie loop, I worked with a 3D-printing enthusiast friend to develop these functional hooks. We had to go through a few design and material iterations before we found a combo that would work without deforming in summer temperatures, but eventually settled on this shape combined with an annealing process to strengthen the PLA material:


If anyone else is interested I might be able to talk him into sharing the 3D print files for them!

Enjoy!

wdb

Very interesting mounting of the screen -- they could probably sell those standalone and folks would grab them up.

I agree with the bigger screen near line of sight being a plus. I use the 4-way flasher mount from @yaz996 and an iPad Mini. You could use one of his mounts for your phone and reduce some clutter. https://rennlist.com/forums/996-foru...one-mount.html

dsbl

I was dubious about the screen in the first pic assuming it was hooked to the hazard trim, but it actually looks great with the housing like that. Did the shop custom fab that part? I'm definitely trying to find a place for a screen somewhere and that looks like a really good option. For the coat hooks petg would probably hold up better to the heat, I've had some (non load bearing) printed parts in my car more than a year and there's not be any heat deformation.

FlyingShawn

That is a SUPER clean mount that you've got there!! That said, it's no longer possible to use something like that in my car: the process of fitting the screen so that it's mostly centered over the center console (and also within easy reach of the driver) required cutting off a significant chunk of the trim right up to the edge of the hazard switch. The cut was made approximately along the driver-side edge of the green tape here:




Yeah, we tried several different materials, but I don't think PETG was one of them just because my friend didn't have any on hand (either that or his printer wasn't compatible with it? Not sure). The annealing process for the PLA was certainly a laborious extra step, but it significantly strengthened the material and it's now survived several significant heat waves while being parked out in the sun with weight on the hangers. Maybe you're right that PETG would work better, I don't know, but what I've got now is working very well for my needs.

dsbl

Yea if the annealing works, no sense in changing it up. Super inspired by this post, gonna have to see if I can set up something like this myself.