Indiglo Gauge Installation - 2nd Gen 4Runner

Bob_98SR5 · 01-07-2006, 11:30 PM

Indiglo Gauge Installation - 2nd Gen 4Runner
By UKMyers

Well I finally got around to installing my indiglo gauges that I purchased off of Ebay today. Many thanks to Luke and Cliff for all their help! We started this morning at about 10pm and had the gauge cluster on the coffee table by 10:30 here’s how we did it!

If you have ever taken the stereo out of your 2nd gen then you will have no problems getting to the gauge cluster.

The first step is to remove the panel underneath the steering wheel. There are 4 phillips head screws and one 10mm bolt holding it up. There is no need to disconnect the gas door release or hood release. Just let it hang down so it’s out of your way.

The next step is to pull off all your heater knobs and pop out the background behind the knobs. This can be a real pain to do. My suggestion is to take a small flat head screwdriver and just work it. Once you get it off there are two Phillips head screws on the right side of the cup holder. You only need to remove the TOP one as the picture shows.

The next step is optional. We did it both ways, as I will explain later. It makes it easier if you take the top and bottom pieces off the steering column. This is easily done with several screws.

Finally take out the two screws in the top of the panel above the instrument cluster and your ready to remove a huge chunk of the dash. Don’t forget to unplug everything and remember where everything goes. It’s all pretty much idiot proof though and the plugs will only fit one hole. The large piece of dash that goes from your driver’s side vent all the way to the clock will now come out. It takes some muscle to pop the clips but it does come out. Once you get it off set it aside out of the way. You instruments are now exposed!

To remove the cluster there are 4 screws in the corners. Once you have removed them there are 4 plugs across the back of the cluster. Unplug these and you should be able pull the cluster out. After we got the cluster out we took it inside to do the tricky work.

With the cluster sitting in front of you there is some simple clips that pop the cover off exposing the instruments after you have done this the real fun begins! The particular gauges I had just laid right on top of the existing ones and there was NO need to remove the needles, which really made it simple. The first one we fitted was the tach and next the speedo when we ran into PROBLEM #1. The speedo gauge had NO HOLE in it for the peg that the needle rests on!!!! The tach did, but not the speedo..hmmmmm So we decided the only option was to drill a hole in it and hope that the indiglo still worked. We drilled the hole using a sharp bit and some luck and then plugged the gauge in and tested it on a 12V battery. It still worked thank god! This was definitely a design flaw, but I guess you get what you pay for on Ebay. Next came the volts, temp, oil, and gas gauges which presented PROBLEM #2 they didn’t snap in right and were not quite as long as the originals. So here’s how we fixed that. Double-sided tape saved the day on this one! Make sure you use the real thin kind or else the needles will hang up on the gauges.

CRITICAL STEP!!!!!!!!!! You must make sure that when you put down your new speedo and tach gauges that you can push the needles up and the will fall back to the pegs under their own weight. If you don’t do this step your stuff won’t work when you put back in as we found out! We neglected this step and consequently the speedo was hanging up the first time we put it back together. So we took everything back apart which the second time around we had the cluster out in 6 minutes!!! We had to experiment with the double sided tape until both gauges fell smoothly We reassembled it and they have worked perfectly since!! If you read anything on this write up this part is important. It sucked thinking we were all done only to rip the whole thing apart again and start over!

Next came the wiring of the relay and box that runs the indiglo part. A ground and power wire is all that is used. You can ground it anywhere that provides a ground and for power we tapped into the cigarette lighter light. It doesn’t matter what you use as long as provides power when the park lights are turned on. Be careful because some wires we found only were hot with the park lights and not the headlights on or vice versa. Once we got it wired up and were satisfied it worked we put everything back together. As far as the relay goes you can hide it up under the panel under the steering wheel somewhere. I just zip tied mine to some existing alarm stuff. Finally we mounted the controls for the indiglos down near the emergency brake out of the way but so it was accessible.

Conclusion: These things weren’t that hard to do and they the look SWEET! Overall I think the average person could do it. If you can work with stereos you can definitely do this mod! Again the things we had the most trouble with were the absence of the peg hole on the speedo and having to use some double-sided tape science to get the gauges to stick down properly!! Other than that No Regrets. Sorry for the lack of pics but we kept forgetting to take them.I hope this info will help some of you looking to trick out your interior. If you have any questions regarding how we did anything feel free to email me at UKMyers@Btinternet.com Thanks again for Luke and Cliff’s patience I owe you guys for sure!

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