Thread: Rod's Rig Car PC (2007 Toyota Hilux)

Good news, it was the input box that failed so the repair is covered under warranty so it has only cost me the return freight to Xenarc as they are covering the cost of return freight to Australia. I have posted more details in the thread linked to in my previous post.

It will be good to be up and running again....

Thanks mate, not sure if the ears come in silver or not but even so with a black fascia around the LCD they would not look out of place anyway. When I bought my headunit 9as a temporary fix, I got another set of "ears" with the DIN pocket kit.

Originally Posted by MeeM

So, you've got your fridge, shower, air compressor, car PC in your Hilux ... might as well put in a stove, oven, microwave, waterbed and hydraulics while you're at it, ye?

Yeh well got the gas stove in the back, the microwave, believe it or not you can get a 12 volt one


http://www.waeco.com.au/products3.as...&subCatId2=87#
but I think they draw about 65 amps ouch!

As for the waterbed, that's a good idea, had not thought of that, would beat the hell out of an airbed!

I'm told the waterbed kits come with a set of extra-heavy-duty springs, too . . .

Sorry Lance, I missed your reply. Life has been hectic here. You might need an extra (ie. third) battery to run it, although I suppose heating a bottle up would only be a short burst!

Anyway, now I got my monitor back from the US after it as repaired, I decided to rethink the mounting of it in the car. Yesterday, I purchased a new Dash Fascia from a wrecker on the way home so I could muck about with the mounting without driving a car whose interior looked like it had been wrecked.



I removed the aluminium plate from the face of the Xenarc monitor and hacked the buttons off the case of the screen and added the 6" extended ribbon cable from RaidGear on eBay.



Cutting off the buttons did not remove any of the screw holes that holds the case or anything together. There is a handy line on the inside of the case to guide you part of the way and then it was simply a matter of being guided by the uprights that hold the buttons in position that follow the same line.

The touch screen sits recessed into the front cover and while 2/3 of it is now gone from the bottom side, the glass cannot fall out as it is such a tight fit and it is held on one side still.

The idea is to end up with something that looks like this:



There will not be too much that needs to be filled in to make this look neat, so hopefully I will get away with a neat finish. The light sensor will be hidden behind the dash unless I can make a window for it. I found that this did not work well as the monitor flickered a lot if the dash was passing in and out of shadow,so I hd always kept the auto brightness turned off.

I am planning on using something like Dynatron, but probably a 3M product as I can get their stuff easilly and I can't find Dynatron down under. I will probably end up gluing everything straight onto the fascia so I have a one piece item. I also will probably mould in a CB Radio microphone mount into the fascia as well while I am at it. I will see how I go.

Anyway, it has been a long time since I have done much, so hopefully, this will be the last time I need to do this!

Well I got a bit of progress on this. I took the bits to a Plastic welder and he said that the dash was polypropylene and in 25 years, he had yet to find something to stick to it and sure enough he could not weld the ABS plastic of the case to the dash fascia.

So anyway, this meant that I would have to mount the monitor into tthe dash like a head unit. I struggled to come up with an idea to make sure everything was in the right position as the Toyota radio is wider than a DIN unit, but the rear where the mounts are are DIN sized.



Anyway driving home from work yesterday, I had a brain wave. I mounted the stock radio back in the fascia and it fitted in nice and snug. I then put a steel ruler up against the back of the head unit and marked the fascia as this is where the mounts are located. Then I positioned the monitor case where I wanted it and transferred these marks onto the monitor case. This was where the side wings needed to go.

I rounded up a couple of side wings from a plastic LCD mounting fascia I never used and visited my plastic welding shop again this morning and he did this:







One side was really easy as the mount needed to be hard up against the edge of the back side of the case, so we just held it together square on the bench and welded it up. Then we used the head unit as a guide to get the width right and welded the other side on. It was a bit more fiddly because of the shape of the case and we decided to simply weld in in some filler pieces rather than cut notches in the side wing I had.

Anway I tried the thing for fit and it lined up quite nicely, but I had to cut a fair bit more off the bottom to get it to fit.



Here is the dash where it had to fit into:



I had a bit of a problem in the bottom left corner and I trimmed a bit of the circuit board. Also there was a case mounting screw too close to the bottom edge which got in the way so I could not trim enough of the bottom of the case. I ended up grinding a fair bit out of the brace above the HVAC controls. Probably should have just cut the whole thing out.

Anway, Here it is all sitting in position:



I was pretty worried about how I would secure this to the radio mounts but there seems to be enough room to get into it frrom the outside to get some screws or bolts.

Anyway, there is a bit more work to do to fill the sides in and get clearance around the buttons, but I think it will work out quite nicely. It will be much better than the steel DIN LCD mount I got from Bybyte once this is done.

Thanks for the encouragement, Looks like yours is well and truly off the ground MeeM. I realised that I did not post a pic of the assembled unit with everything put back together. Here it is.