Tip 4: Making Your Own Gauge Locations

Here's another question that comes up a lot so it's time for Tip 4.

Ok after seeing your center console with t gauges mounted above the cd player i almost died.I love it.I want it. I have to have it.  How do I do it?

Both my WRX and my MR2 came with dual din CD/Tape decks that take up twice the space of a new deck you'd buy.  Usually when you buy a deck the seller also tries to get you to buy an "install kit" which consists of a bracket and a pocket to take up the space that the original deck has just vacated.  The problem with these pockets is they're utterly useless as anything you put in there is going to come flying out the first time you hit the brakes with any meaningful force.

So rather than stick the pocket in like everybody else, I actually smoothed over the location and made a gauge mounting location.



The trick to this is a little bit of backyard engineering using unorthodox materials.  The problem with filling in a location like that is there's a 90 degree bend.  It's suprisingly hard to find plastic pieces that aren't part of something else you wouldn't want to ruin that also contain a 90 degree bend.  The solution comes from your local hardware store.  Walk in, and ask where to find these:

http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1vZ1xh8/R-100318664/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053

They're gass blocks you sometimes see in bathrooms.  Somewhere in that section of the store (I can't find a link to the actual product online for some reason) you'll find a piece of plastic that looks like this:



This is a bracket that you use to mount those glass blocks to the floor or wherever you're putting them. As you can see it's got a 90 degree bend.  It's also got a line down the middle that inexplicably is almost exactly the same size as the slot you need to fill in.  What you do from here is measure the location you want to fill, cut a piece to length, take down the edges, and glue it in place. 

As far as gluing it in place there's two things:

1. Reinforce the area. Well.  If you haven't pre-drilled your gauge holes, and I'd actually recommend that you not because drilling through it will tell you if you made it sturdy enough, you need something behind the piece you cut to actually connect it with the mounting surface.

What I do is get the piece that'll be on the front exactly the right size to fit the location I want to fill in first. 



Then I cut off a slightly larger piece for the back side and take off the 90 degree portion with a dremel and a cutoff wheel.



2. For glue I use a product category called "Plastic Weld".   I tried regular epoxy first because I have tons of it, but it didn't work.  I was walking through the auto parts store and found "Plastic Weld Epoxy" in the aisle that had RTV Silicon and such.  This worked much better.  It works better than epoxy on plastic because first off it's specifically designed for that job and it also has some flex to it just like the plastic pieces you're gluing together.   That way when the piece flexes (like when you're actually putting in your gauges) the thing won't crack. 

You will invariably need to fill in the gap between the piece you glued in and the location you're mounting it to.  You'll also want to fill in any minor scratches or imperfections on the plastic.  For that see Tip 1.  I just use the same bumper filler stuff I go over in detail in that post.