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Indiglo Gauges - 1995 4Runner
Indiglo Gauges - 1995 4Runner By L33T35T Jason (L33T35T 4Runner on the forums) shows you how he installed some indiglo gauges in his 2nd gen 4Runner. Make sure you read the UPDATE before you start installing the gauges!! TOOLS REQUIRED
HERE ARE MY STEP-BY-STEP, SUPER DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS: Remove kick panel. 4 screws, 1 10mm bolt. pull e-brake and pull panel down... do not remove gas latch or hood latch. Remove metal bar and 3 10-mm bolts. Metal bar removed. Remove these 7 screws... 4 surrounding and 3 in the middle.. Keep them separate as they are different. Bottom cover to steering column will drop. Remove top piece. Work at it.. It takes some effort. The other review said it wasn't necessary to remove this.. but I found it necessary, as I couldn't get the main dash panel off without taking the steering column cover off. The top piece of the steering column has a light on it.. so instead of removing it, I just let it hang. Damn that's messy... Remove the 2 screws in the top of the gauges area. (note I took this picture after gauges were installed) Remove the a/c and heater control knobs... just pull them off. Take a small flathead screwdriver, put in this area only a small bit, tilt screw driver down, push up, and pull out. I was worried about breaking it the first time I did it, and most people are. But once you've done this around 20 times, you have it out in seconds. Remove this screw... you only need to remove the top screw. Me trying to replicate UKMyers picture . Just find a good place to grab on to and yank it out Unplug the rear defogger and hazard light controls Lots of things to unplug here for me. Fog lights, alarm light, and dimmer control. If you have anything that's after market installed there, you might wanna take a picture to remember how things go back together, like this next picture. Like this... had to remember which wire goes where by the way. I ended up tapping into this line. I didn't feel like taping into the line that the gauge lights are hooked up to because: A. I wouldn't want a dimmer on unit that already has a dimmer. B. I still wanted to be able to turn off the dimmer lights without turning off the indiglo and visa versa. C. It was just a hell of a lot easier. (Not shown) once I got the main front off the gauge cluster was exposed. There are 4 screws which are very easy to get to and remove. Remove those and pull the unit out. It feels like the lines are quite short but they have a lot more slack than it first feels like. Give it a pull and you can fit your hand behind there. There are 4 clipping plugs that have wires. Here's a picture of those. Unplug those then unplug the odometer cable. That has a clip also. 4 plugs and 1 odometer cable/connection shown unplugged with cluster removed. Cluster on my lap. Here's the cluster with the cover off on my garage floor, on a towel so we wouldn't scratch anything. There were 9 clips in all for the cluster front cover. Its a little tricky getting them off all at the same time. With a little help from my friend I got them off. The second time I had to take the cluster out (couple days later, i'll explain why later) I had to do it myself and got it done. OK, here's the tricky part. I though I'd try this without buying some double sided tape. BAD IDEA. I put the gauges on there and and they just moved around like all hell. I ended up taking my dads car to Sav-On really quick to pick up some double sided tape, along with two candy bars (didn't wanna put just $2.88 on my debit card). We put double sided ("double stick" it was officially called) tape on the old gauges, then positioned the new gauges into place. Simply put the needle of the speedometer or tachometer through the middle hole and position the thing into place. UKMyers had to drill a hole for his speedometer as he had a stop pole. I don't have this stop pole for my speedometer so I didn't have to drill my new gauges. If you need to, then go ahead, I guess it worked for him *shrug*. For the side 4 gauges I put 2 strips of tape going horizontally across the gauge and then one piece of tape going up and down as far to the edge of the gauge as I could. Then I put the gauge in and held it down for 30 seconds to a minute. Got all the gauges on and put the cover back on. Tried to snap the 9 clips closed, but one wouldn't close as shown here. I just let the wires hang out the tops. The obvious reason is because the wires held it out, oh well. I then put the cluster back in and secured the 4 cluster screws. I ran the 4 plugs (each side of small gauges shared a plug, and each large gauge had its own plug, making 4 plugs) and wires around the top to the left of the cluster, down to the bottom, and across the bottom till I got to the steering column. Then I ran those wires to the transformer thingy that I just allowed to rest on the air conditioning pipe behind the left side main cover (which was removed for the time being, of course). Then I put the main dash cover back on. Don't forget to plug back in the rear defogger and hazard on the right side, and any controls on the left side (alarm, fog lights and dimmer in my case). I actually just let the fog light wires hang as I still needed to tap into that line to power the gauges. Here's me replacing the steering column cover. Put the bottom on first and secure it with the 3 middle (smaller) screws, then try to put the top cover back on (its a bitch to get on and off). Secure the 4 outer screws. Unit should not move at all anymore. Don't forget to secure the dash screws. My friend liked taking pictures of me for some reason. Put the a/c and heater screw back in. You can go ahead and put the a/c heater controls back together. Here's where I secured the controller for the gauges. Here's the final product... yay! MY SUGGESTION ON HOW TO HOOK UP THE GAUGES FOR A STANDARD INSTALLATION If I didn't have an obvious hookup line to my headlights/foglights, then I would have just ran a hard line into the battery and hooked up a toggle switch to the gauges. Only problem with this is if you forget to turn them off, you might end up with a dead battery in the morning. MY VIEW ON HOW I LIKE & USE MY GAUGES The gauges are hooked into the headlight line. When the headlights are on, the gauges were on. The unit itself has no way to turn them off, just dim down much. When I first installed my gauges I loved the brightness of them and how cool they look. But it got kind of annoying when driving to have this bright thing showing in your face while driving at night. I found out if i dim it all the way, it looks pretty cool with the green lights of the needles lighting up the white background. When my car was in my garage I turned off the headlights and the gauges turned off, but the parking light was still on which meant the interior lights were still on. The needle glowed on the white gauge and looks AWESOME. I decided to jimmy rig some way to turn the gauges off. You can read how i did that in the update below When I drive at night normally I'll leave the gauges off and let the needles glow up the white background. Looks very cool. If im in a sporty mood, I'll turn the gauges off and dim the needles all the way down making the black needles on a blue or green (i don't like the blue glow) background, VERY cool also. UPDATE: TACH NOT WORKING!! Well I got my gauges all installed and didn't even bother to drive my car that night. The next day I went to school and found my tachometer not working! Couple days later took it all apart by myself (had it done in about 15 minutes this time instead of the 2 hours last time). Turns out the tachometer gauge's holes were a tiny tiny bit off. It was rubbing with the center of the needle. I just took it out and put new tape down, this time putting lots around the center. When I put the gauge back on, I made sure I put it down and to the left as much as possible to make sure it wouldn't rub anymore. Installed the gauge really quick and it worked fine. Also when I was moving around I accidentally broke off the stop pole for the tachometer.. oops!! I MODDED THE MOD I took the liberty at this time to rig up an on/off switch for the gauges themselves. I used an old toggle switch I had laying around. I just taped into the black (negative/ground) line and let the switch just be accessible near the foot brake and put it all back together in minutes. All in all, it took me about 3 or 4 hours (this includes the trip to the store, about 15 minutes) to get those gauges installed. Costs were 30 for the gauges off Ebay, $9 shipping, and about $3 for the double sided tape. I definitely recommend this mod for somebody who wants a one-of-a-kind look for their gauges. It was DEFINITELY worth the price. I got my gauges from msispeed@hotmail.com on Ebay. They were offered as a BUY NOW for $32 plus $9 shipping. The auction ended right before I hit the buy now button so I emailed him and asked if I could buy them for 30+9. he said sure.I sent him a check and he sent my gauges even before the check cleared! Great guy to deal with. He has very good reviews on Ebay too. Thanks for UKMyers for his review. He helped me tear my car down and put it back together. I hoped I touched up a little more on how to wire the SOB up. Also thanks to my friend Alex for coming over (even though he randomly showed up like he always does) and helping me. He also took some of the pictures. If you choose to do this mod good luck, and if you have any questions https://www.yotatech.com/forums/images/sendpm.gif (L33T35T 4Runner ) on the Yotatech Forum. If you have any questions (how could you with the detail i put into this thing, lol) email me. Good luck on your project!! |
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