| I lucked in to a near-perfect used Euro dash to replace the cracked one. This will make almost as much difference in the interior as the seat upholstery shown on the interior pages. |
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| The instrument cluster housing was faded and scuffed, I picked up this one from a guy in California.
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| The odometer worked when we got the car running, but quit shortly thereafter. I suspected the reason was the plastic gears that are known to get brittle after time. Like the silver paint, I think these were victims of the 5 years the car spent sitting in the sun.
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| If you look closely here, you can see the small gear that is broken.
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| The cluster is a bit of work to get out, so I wanted to address anything that might be an issue rather than do the job several times.
Here are the parts I put in (clockwise from top left)
New Service interval board (old one shown)
New small lights from BMW
New knobs for the headlight and fog light switches from BMW
Sylvania 168LL long life bulbs for the instruments, these are 4.9w instead of the OEM 3w bulbs
New odometer gears. (Instructions)
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| The dash cluster all disassembled. The tach goes into the opening on the left, the speedometer on the right.
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| Here is the speedometer and odometer unit separated.
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| All of the small black caps are those little bulbs I mentioned earlier. There are 12 of them, and they illuminate all the trouble lights and things like the turn signal and high beam indicators. The green circuit board is the Service Interval board, already replace in this picture with the new one.
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| Here you can see the new odometer gears installed. The old gears are in the foreground.
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| Finally, the full refurbish instrument cluster ready to be reinstalled!
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| Here it is in place. Note the new upholstery on the passenger seat. The drivers seat is ready to be installed as well.
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| I found this under the seat, apparently a 1980's vintage security system. It had a huge bundle of wires that had to be tracked down and extracted from the dash, the trunk, even the engine compartment. Not pictured is what got installed in it's place!
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| The knee panel underneath the steering column had a large hole in, probably for a stereo or security system switch. I was fortunate to fine another pacific blue piece to use in its place.
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| Gotta have tunes! Besides being appropriately German, this one has a USB port, plays MP3 CDs, has bluetooth connectivity to a cell phone, and can be adjusted to one of 4096 colors so it can match the illumination in any dash. It may sound silly, but I wanted red illumination to match the rest of the dash.
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| Can't wait to hear how this sounds in the car!
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