Tuesday, January 6, 2009

BMW E36 coupe dashboard retrofit

I have spent a lot of time in the garage over Christmas, working on my car. The temperature in the garage was constantly less then 3°C, but otherwise it was very relaxing.

The point of me almost freezing to death was to upgrade the old half grey dashboard in my 3er to a better looking all black dash that BMW put in these cars after the facelift.





While having the dash off, I also decided it was a good time to rethink, rebuild and most importantly tidy up all the custom electronics that I have been working on over the last year. This includes the wires and crossovers of the front speakers, the alarm and my little black box that takes care of rolling up the windows upon locking the car.

The point of the black box is to intercept the communication between the alarm and the rest of the car and modify it or react to it. The most visible function is the automatic window roll-up upon locking. It also contains diodes needed to connect all door sensors to a single pin on the alarm, a relay that prevents the automatic locking of doors after starting and parts of other mechanisms that I have not yet fully implemented. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the inside of the box..



The new dashboard fits very well, there are no squeaking noises or similar. The glove compartment door will need a little fixing, though, it doesn't fit very well, probably due to bad mounting of the central panel next to it. I have also spilled some of the substance that I was using for cleaning over the dash as you can see on the picture, otherwise the dash is very clean and looks nice.

The next upgrade will probably be a new steering wheel and some black floor mats.







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9 Comments:

Blogger G said...

Thats awesome dude, I'm planning this at some point as well - how long did it take? I'm guessing there isnt actually an airbag in the pass side on your new dash?

Chris

November 27, 2009 at 11:16 AM  
Blogger Jaroslav Klíma said...

It took me two weeks because I was at home for Christmas, didn't need to use the car and did other stuff while the dash was out. If you only wanted to remove the dashboard and fit a new one you could probably do it in one night, unless you don't get stuck on something (like the screws under the front window vents, they are impossible if you don't have the right tools)

November 27, 2009 at 11:25 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

great job man... I think about that dashboard fromE36 sedan/coupe to install in E36 compact, but before than I start I want to be sure is it easy job or need a lot of warious modification`s... can you give me some information, any picture, link anything.... thanks a lot

April 4, 2010 at 9:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I dont think it has to do with facelifts, its pass side airbag and not having one

August 9, 2010 at 12:39 AM  
Blogger Jaroslav Klíma said...

I thought that only (all) facelifted cars had passanger side airbags, but you are probably right. It seems that the new dashboard (and second airbag) was fitted as soon as 1994 and facelift was in 1996.

August 9, 2010 at 8:23 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i dont think the coupes had pass. airbags. and the e36 sedan to compact dash is pretty straight forward. im doing it here in a few weeks i came up on a really clean one at a friends junk yard. all black

August 15, 2010 at 11:01 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

got that backwards. coupes did have a pass airbag while sedans didnt.

August 15, 2010 at 11:28 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

did you have to remove vin?

July 27, 2014 at 10:39 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

An access control point, which can be a door, turnstile, parking gate, elevator, or other physical barrier, where granting access can be electronically controlled.
Typically, the access point is a door. An electronic access control door can contain several elements.For more details please see.

electronic door lock

September 23, 2015 at 12:46 AM  

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