On Sunday I worked on the driver side dash. I needed to rewire the information center because I had changed how the lights worked and which ones did what. It took some figuring, but fortunately, I had a diagram I had put together originally that stated which wires did what, so it was a matter of transcribing the old and new and soldering the wires back together. Once that was done, I was able to mount the dash.
After mounting the dash, I tried the lights and everything worked until I tried the dimmer. I noticed that the center gauges did not dim. It was then that I realized the I had screwed up! The dimmer that I am using for the lights needs to have both the hot and ground go to the dimmer switch. When I wired the gauges, I ganged all the grounds together back to chassis ground. So I had to take the gauges out again and rewire them so that the ground ran back to dimmer. This meant that I had to pull the driver side dash out one more time. After an hour of rewiring and refitting, I had everything in the car and it's all working correctly now.
I still have some work to do on the center console to get the gear selector lights working, but that should be a minor amount of work. I'm also sewing new shifter and parking brake boots out of the tan vinyl to get rid of some of the overwhelming black center console.
Here are pictures:
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| Center console installed sans shifter and e-brake boots |
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| Complete dash |
