Well, my previous configuration looked pretty cool, but lacked some practical features I need. After a few days spent re-hosting a website, I'm now back on noodling out my dash hoop, scuttle mounting, firewall and dashboard layout. I've cut out a new feature for my tilt steering wheel, but added material back in elsewhere to deal with needed dash hoop structure. It's all pretty rough cardboard, but it is helpful to my thinking.
It may look pretty much the same to most of you:
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Besides going back and accurately locating the shifter stub, which is an inch or two forward of where I was showing it before, I needed the steering wheel cut out:
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. . . and I needed to add some more edge material at the passenger side.
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The Mustang instrument cluster is proving to be awkward to deal with. It's physically fairly big, and it is sculpted in a way that makes a simple, clean mounting of it on a flat dashboard difficult. I haven't come up with a satisfactory scheme yet. I'm debating whether I want to put a lot of effort into doing it at all. Maybe some simple, stand-alone gauges would be worth the expense, if they simplify the construction of the dash hoop & dashboard?
I have the Mustang wiring harness, which makes it an easy fit-up te stock panel component-wise. Not knowing how the Mustang ECU will behave if it can't find the stock instrument panel at start-up/self-test time is clouding my thinking. Will it be a problem, me wonders? The outline on the white paper is the visible portion of the panel. The unit and its mounts are from 7/8" to 1" wider than the visible area, depending on where you're looking:
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When you add in some elementary dash hoop structure, the space conflict gets pretty obvious.
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That's it for today. I'm going to check around tonight for some simple, economical alternatives to the Mustang instrument panel.
Cheers,