Tonight I dug into doing the following
- Fixing the burned out bulbs in the instrument cluster and headlight/foglight switches
- Greasing the new odometer gears the PO recently installed that are making that annoying grinding noise.
- Moving the bluetooth hands-free mic from above the instrument cluster to up by the driver's sunshade
- Installing the remote display for my new Valentine One radar locator
- Preparing the wiring for my USB power plug adapter i'm going to install next to the stereo.
I'm mostly done, but I didn't get to the auto parts store in time today to get bulbs so I will have to finish putting it back together tomorrow.
To do all this I need to remove the center console, stereo/hvac control module, and instrument panel. Based on thread's I've read here an my Bentleys it all went pretty smoothly.
I realized removing the steering wheel would make getting the instrument cluster out easy (possible?) and would generally ease working, so I pulled it off too.
Gawd I love doing shit like this.
Great threads here on mye28 made it clear how to pull instrument cluster apart and get the speedometer out.
No grease.
Some grease.
I used a q-tip and dabbed a little grease on the gears as I carefully rotated them with my fingernail. I didn't feel like taking the assembly apart; worked fine.
Some of the lighbulbs are clearly burned out (e.g. the one from the headlight switch). Others I wasn't sure so I wanted to test them. An old 12V AC adapter and some voltmeter probes made an instant tester:
I had no idea what the blubs looked like before I started this project. Here's a pic for others, just so you know.
Some sort of PO repair on the foglight switch bulb socket. Also you can see that a PO did some modification to the bracket. There was some old wiring in there too; he tells me back in the day he had an old skool cell phone wired in there somehow.
The new location for the BT hands-free mic. I'm hoping this picks up my voice better than it did down on the instrument cluster.
The V1 gets mounted up in front of the rear view mirror. The rear facing sensor sticks out to the right so it can 'see' out the rear window. On my '95 540 M-Sport I mounted an RJ11 jack up there (
http://www.kindel.com/bmw/valone.htm). For the E28 I decided to just have the wire come through the slight gap between the headliner and windshield.
The nice thing about this mount is that the detector fairly inconspicuous from outside the car and completely hidden from the driver (the mirror shields it). The passenger has to see it, but who cares about the passenger?
The hard-wired power adapter for the Valentine One is hooked into the ignition switched power lead for the stereo. I mounted it under the left side of the stereo (using the included velcro). You can see it in the center of this picture with the two RJ11s coming out of it. I made a short RJ11 cord to go from the power adapter to the remote display (the gray one).
For the remote display I decided I didn't want it on the instrument cluster shelf like I did on my M-Sport (see pics in link above). Instead I decided I was going to mount it just below the shelf on the right side of the steering wheel. Right above the ejector seat button. With it there it is visible through the steering wheel and the mute button is easy to press with the right hand.
To do this I made a little bracket from an old computer case hard drive bay blank.
I drilled a hole in the bracket that the screw that holds the dash kick cover in place will go through. The bracket is angled so that when the display is attached to it (with velcro) it is angled toward the driver's eyes.
Here's roughly how it will look with the wheel in place. The flash shows off the bottom edge of the silver bracket. If I find it is visible when done, it'll be easy to trim so it is not visible.
While I had everything apart vacuumed and cleaned everything well. There was some dust and grime build up behind the stereo and under the center console, but it wasn't too bad. I have the center console back in. Tomorrow I'll put the instrument cluster back in after a trip to the auto-parts store for bulbs.
Fun stuff!
