Thread: Cadillac Escalade EXT motorized latop install

here is a few shots of how I did this motorization. I used a power window motor & cable drive with a pair of heavy duty roller bearing drawer slides all welded together to build the framework, then it's wired with relays & limit switches for extended & retracted positions. this framework is welded to the main steel support beam in the dash so it's very strong

Nice video, Turbo! For a minute I thought it was Enzo (the accent maybe, from New Jersey too? sorry no idea) the guy from the current Big Brother...(no ofense, first time I saw you on vid :-)).

In a word. Solid. Very cool. I kind of regret not having a tablet with a touch screen, only a digitizer. Its much easier to use when driving. I wish I could have both.

There's no way I have that amount of space under the dash of my Sequoia thought, it's incredibly limited. Even less room behind it than on the FX, you remove the OEM radio on the FX you got a nice room there, on the Sequoia it's the firewall already all the way to the pedal level. Very limiting.

Thanks for posting this!

that's funny man, but if theres any accent then it's strictly Brooklyn

I didn't really have enough room for the track assy, it needed to go almost all the way to the firewall. I had to remove the whole inner heater/ac box & alter it with cutting & plastic welding & building new walls & ducts to add space for everything to fit. it was a pretty tight fit to get everything this compact & flush. he wanted enough room to carry a passenger in the middle seat which is the whole reason for this design, originally the escalade ext had a full center console but he removed it & added a center jumper style seat that folds to an armrest type thing.

heres something you in particular may recognize these shots are the center compartment prepped for building the side walls from that same max emc compound that I built my overhead console with









I made the center console door out of the sunglass holder from my fx... I was searching for the right thing to build the center compartment out of & it winded up being around the right size & shape, & the recess winded up fitting my steel rod magnet hinge design that I came up with

for the touch screen, why not make a frame with a window that is the touch screen, then, just slide the tablet into the frame & while it's in the frame it'll work as a touchscreen, when you remove it you can use the digitizer or yo could still use the digitizer in the car too, just have to switch off the usb touchscreen so they both don't register the same touch & give a double click...

Originally Posted by turbocad6

that's funny man, but if theres any accent then it's strictly Brooklyn

I didn't really have enough room for the track assy, it needed to go almost all the way to the firewall. I had to remove the whole inner heater/ac box & alter it with cutting & plastic welding & building new walls & ducts to add space for everything to fit.

Only now I'm beginning to comprehend the work you did. Now I need to open up everything again and see it with another set of eyes! LOL

heres something you in particular may recognize these shots are the center compartment prepped for building the side walls from that same max emc compound that I built my overhead console with

Oh, so you are using the FX's sunglasses holder inverted as the basis for that holder thing below - which I thought was OEM!

I made the center console door out of the sunglass holder from my fx... I was searching for the right thing to build the center compartment out of & it winded up being around the right size & shape, & the recess winded up fitting my steel rod magnet hinge design that I came up with

Very cool. What are those buttons and display below that? Also that circular thing...I suppose they OEM buttons relocated? Or are they remote buttons?

Originally Posted by turbocad6

for the touch screen, why not make a frame with a window that is the touch screen, then, just slide the tablet into the frame & while it's in the frame it'll work as a touchscreen, when you remove it you can use the digitizer or yo could still use the digitizer in the car too, just have to switch off the usb touchscreen so they both don't register the same touch & give a double click...

That's a cool idea. The trick would be to make the frame as tight as possible, because the Tablet is already big in the car (12.1"). Now that I have an iPad, I have no problem leaving the tablet in the car at all times, so maybe I could build something just for the screen, but I'm not sure how far I could go from the MB. I think I would need 12" to hide everything in the console, and I suspect I won't have even 6" from the screen (LVDS cable? can they be extended?) to the tablet's MB.

this is exactly what the dash looked like in this EXT before we switched it over to black & got rid of all the woodgrain. the whole console was removed & trashed to put a center seat instead of a console. the console you see in my pictures was built from scratch, the round thing is the clock grafted in & the buttons & display is the trip computer, also grafted flush into the console I built. my console is built from fiberglass. I also did the whole dash gloss black but there is a felt cover made for the whole top because it was giving a lot of glare during the day

Now I got it, thanks.

Do you have an idea of the overall length of the hardware, fully operational? I mean on the 3rd picture on the 2nd post above, with the tablet on top of its base. Either that is a giant screwdriver (prybar?) or it is about 20" long (edit: I meant 12, not 20)?

that's just a big screwdriver, used in that shot as a chock to lift the front & hold the assy so it won't tilt forward & fall off that table. total depth retracted is probably around 20" or so? all that extra length was necessary to have the roller slides be able to extend all the way out & still be strong even when fully extended. originally I didn't think the tracks would need to be much deeper than the depth of the laptop but it don't work that way, it needs to be long enough to extend as far as needed & still have a lot of overlap because the rollers only remain engaged on the overlap itself when fully extended, the more overlap when fully extended the stronger it will be. these are nothing more than home depot universal HD roller drawer slides...

the 2nd picture in post 2 shows it fully extended & you can see that the remaining engagement overlap part is down to only ~20% of the total extended length. a cable drive power window motor is great for motorization like this because you can then use bicycle brake cables as the cable drive & make them as long as you need them, that is what I used here. the window motor drive has a spool in that assy that the cable wraps around on maybe 5-6 times for engagement, then the springs at either end of the inlet & outlet for the cable drive absorb any tension at end of travel. I also had to use relays & a micro switch at both full extension & full retraction to open the circuit so the motor doesn't continue to apply pressure at the end of travel or it would just continue to wind & break a cable or pulley, that's what gives it that firm snapping into place action, it winds fast & hard till it hits the limit switch then stops... a window motor like this is really great for motorization because it can then be remote mounted & all motion is transfered with just cables & pulleys, would be much more space problem trying to do this with a linear actuator or something... another good thing to use for strong motorization is a sunroof motor assy.