Thread: 2001 Pontiac Sunfire

I feel bad, because i was so engrossed in my project that I didn't take very many pictures of the development process. I have gotten so much from the forums, that feel i should try to give back. I have the final pictures and the initial pictures of the project. I think I'm gonna have to take out the screen from the car so I will be able to take pitcures of the back of the bondoed bezel.

I have the pitcure of the bezel from the front before i worked on it. It had two openings, one for the double din radio on top, then the AC controls on the bottom.



I spent 2-3 days with bondo and sanding to make this the shape i wanted. I went to home depot and got square dowel rods and made a frame for my 8" lilliput. I then bondoes the frame into the bezel. I used the brackets that held the screen in the factory case, to hold the screen in the bezel. I also had to cut the crap out of my dash to fit such a large monitor in. I am really happy with the result, minus a few points. I did not smooth out the recessed part of the screen enough, and the screen and recession make a 90 degree angle. The 90 degree angle makes in hard to push certain buttons. I also used rustoleum hammered paint, and the color happened to match near perfect, so i just went to an art store and put on 20+ coats of matte finish clear coat.



I also had to cut out a useless part of my console unit so I could drop the big fat radio down. I have jammed the radio in there real tight so it doesn't move. Wehn it did move my right front speaker made noises like it was coming in and out. Here is why. I found a list of what wires go to what speakers, and i jammed wires in the harness to see if i could make my own wiring harness for sound output. In doing this i opened up the holes in the factory harness, so the connection isn't tight, and when i drove the speaker made noise.



I have included a picture from the underside of my seat, this is where the CARPC will go. It was in here a while ago, but i had to take it out b/c of a fire. The seat moves up and down on a two tracks, there is a support bar to make sure that each side moves at the same pace, i had mounted my carpc on this bar using a sheet of plexiglass.


You can see i actually put a nut in the bar to lower it so the pc would fit on top of it. The IDE cable runs right near the bar. you can also see my mini keyboar behind the bar.

That was way too tight. This week i'm gonna build a case from plexiglass and just remove that bar and set the Car Pc on the floor onder the seat. Everything was very tight underneath there, so I raised the seat with washers. This gave me an extra centimeter or two to work with.

The reason i decided to raise the seat even with the extra room from removing the support bar is that i don't think i am going to use a right angle extender for my video card. My right angle extender also burnt up, that is why i won't use it unless i can fix it.


My DVD player is in the center console i had to mod it to put it there, but you can see the 36" ide cable coming out of the bottom of the console, (between the console and the seat, you can also see the homemade molex connector in the bottom left of the next pic


heres how small my keyboard is.

If you want to know hwere i got it, you'll have to PM me and I'll look it up, b/c i don't have it off the top of my head. I'll put more pics up later in the week when it works

-drew

www.home.cwru.edu/~abf