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Well, i am more of an interior person, so a cheap thing to change that looks good is the speedometer gauges. I got this from ebay for really cheap (around $30) so i was satisfied, although the seller was bad and one of the item is defective, which means i gotta return it and wait for them to "inspect" it and tell me it's defective. This are the stock Honda Accord gauges, they are ok but too much black i guess. so i decided to replace them for some white indiglow gauges.
To take this gauges out, what you gotta do is unscrew the 2 screws on the top of the dash. Now comes the tricky part, you gotta pull this plastic grey cover. However, there are some clips in the bottom. The top comes out easy cuz it's just held in place by the two screws. So start from the side and try to pull it gently, if you break it it's your fault, don't blame me. Do the same for the other side until you get it out.
After you take that plastic thing out, there are 4 screws i believe, 2 on top, and 2 on the bottom. Unscrew those and then pull the speedometer out. On the back, there are going to be 3 cables connected, just disconnect them (the way you do this is by slanting the speedometer ( this way -> /) so that the top is closer to you, while the bottom is in the back. Then just unplug the cables and it's out. The cables pretty much stay in place so that you won't get them mixed up when connecting them back. I should have taken more pics, but unfortunately i didn't. Then, take the speedometer to a place well lighted, and take the plastic cover, and then the black housing, they are just connected thru some clips. They easy to take out. After that you just place the gauges. I took this pic from some other website, but this is how you put the gauges in. Turn the needle to a 12 o clock position, and slide the gauges in, try not to bend them
Once you do all three of them, you gotta make a way for the wires to come out from the housing, since it won't close if you just try to run the wires. I used a knife and heat up like a screw driver to smooth out edges. If you have a soldering iron is faster as it heats up faster. You can see that the wire is gonna impede the housing from closing, so you need to carve out like a ditch for the wire to
Here is everything assembled. It looks nice huh? Well at least it looks better than the stock gauges.
Now just put it back, and install the speedometer back. Now, we need to take care of all the wiring. The best place to do that is in the fuse compartment. First, ground the power controller that comes with the gauges to the chassis, just use the ground that's already in there. Then for power, you need to tap into some power line, i did it to the parking light power, since you only want the gauges to turn on when you turn on the lights. For the honda accord, the power wire is red with a black stripe. Just tap into that and then hook up the connections to your gauges, and you are done! Congrats, good job. |
