Aftermarket gauge clusters?

its not all that hard to make aftermarket gauges fit. Just need to make a panel to mount them too.

 

You mean something like this?




Warning lights go here (along with oil temp):




And shift light:




Edit: I'm re-working all of it, but that's the gist of what I run.

 

Sure. These are older pics, the car is in pieces right now getting re-done, so I can't take any current ones, but this is what you are looking for I think:






I have no issues at all seeing the gauges. FWIW, on the oil pressure gauge, water temperature gauge, and oil temperature gauge I used the Auto Meter version that has warning lights built in. I set my range, and if the gauge leaves the range a red LED is lit up on the gauge face. Works nice as a warning light.

Edit: the 3 little circles in the first picture at the top of the bezel, in the middle and then 1 on each side are LEDs for my turns signals and high beams. I'm now adding a shield thing for the high beam because it was too bright and aimed right in my eyes. The LEDs for the turn signals are bright but not distracting.

 

What shift light is that [MENTION=15705]mcglsr2[/MENTION] ?

 

Ecliptech Shift-i (click for link to site). It's tits, easily the best stand-alone shift light you can get IMO. There's a couple different styles, with different light patterns. Mine is the 4 green, 2 amber, 1 red LED type. I love it.

 

Wiring wasn't too bad. I have the factory manuals, so the most time consuming part was figuring out where to tap into everything to get what I need. I basically spliced off the cluster connectors for what I needed and then taped them up. I have wiring notes I can post up to help with the process if you'd like.

The pics below show what it sort of looks like. It looks worse than it is, and part of my project now is to actually clean up the wiring and re-loom it so it doesn't look like spaghetti:








I got the LED-lit gauges - if you go this route (rather than the incandescent ones), I recommend this guy to help control the gauge lights. Your stock dimmer rheostat won't dim the gauges properly (assuming you want to dim that all). You wire the Auto Meter LED dimmer into your light circuit, and then you can dim the gauges if you want. If you can wait a bit, I'm actually in the process of re-wiring the gauges and adding in a fuse block and will show everything I did. If you want to catch up with where I currently am, jump to here in my build thread.

 

Was never a fan of the florida 5.0 piece puts the gauges in a very odd spot, so I made my own and couldn't be happier.

 

Those are NICE just wish Id be able to keep some of the features in the cluster.

 

If you are referring to the idiot lights, you can; you can either make up a separate cluster like I did, or drill out little holes in the main cluster and put LEDs there. In my setup, I have all the things the original cluster did.

 

I see what you're saying the only think I really want to change is the actual gauges and leave the rest alone.

 

Oh okay, well then you can do something similar-ish to what 95opal did, maybe sort of gut the stock cluster and use a custom mounting plate for gauges. Just understand that you will not be able to fit as many gauges in there *and* retain the warning lights (You may not even be able to fit the speedo and tacho Auto Meter gauges). You will still also need to do some wiring to get the connectors that fed the gauge cluster to function properly. IMO, it's a lot of work - not too much more work and you could completely swap it out, so I'm not sure I see the benefit of keeping the stock cluster.

 

Gotcha.. Maybe one day I'll tackle it right now I have a list of mods to take care of. Thanks for the info!

 

Sure thing dude, and good luck!

 

Lol thanks I'm a girl btw

 

Have you thought about trying a digital cluster like from racepak? Few buddies of mine use them in there offload toys.

 

Duly noted.

Incidentally, I decided to do a write-up on swapping to aftermarket gauge cluster. Since I am re-doing it right now, figured I might as well document it. Once it's done I'll post it up and maybe it'll help you decide what you want to do.

 

Awesome thank you