Restomod Car: 3 GTE Digital Dash start

Digital dash — yes, you saw right — there is a digital dash available (from an Opel GTE) for this ’90s car, and here I will heavily modify it to make it work, repair it, change it to custom colours, and merge it into the instrument panel of the car. First I need to boot it up: it was bought as unknown, presumed dead, and I would certainly like to include LED lighting instead of bulbs. Just getting 12V power into it without a plug required some soldering and hunting.

For it to work I also need a rare Sensor, the AK one shown below, lots of misinformation about that one, in reality there is a switch on my version of the dash where I can select the AK sensor so can always make it work with an, although equally rare alternative. as you can see in the image I did get it to work, without lighting. Fixing that is a first task.

To that end in a first step I need to build some new “bulbs” from modifying standard LED -pure white- bulbs packaged to retrofit into old cars, still need to cut these apart with a Dremel to fit them into the old holders for the bulbs in the instrumentation.  First picture also show the new socket and plug I need to graft onto it, and the old diffuser that made those 80’s LED yellow numerals and indication, those needs to be ground down and replaced with colored gel-films to change it.

Success! There is light and adding a colored gel cut to size brings out some nice red, actually a standard Opel dash color. Here I also cut in pieces and ground down parts of the old diffuser to allow for multi-colored indication, some white green blue and yellow parts. Carefully cutting out holes allowing the pure white to shine through made a nice contrast for the numerals, and allowing the other parts of the instrumentation use the existing colors seemed correct.

Another necessary fix was to use some plastic “Welding” to rebuild material so that the screws have enough force to make the connection to the LCD screens. as seen in the image below some parts of the screen can fall out when not enough connection is present, and the plastic is a bit brittle since it’s from the 80’s.

Then there is the matter of Fixing a plug, since the original is hard to track down, so unsoldering all pin’s of the socket, quite a bit of work, but I need to be able to lock this in. It also made sense to me to exchange those old electrolytic caps, since they do dry out over time, and having been made close to 40 years ago they may well drift in value or fail soon.

Last, for now I hook up the sensor and spin it to make sure it is working, now what’s left is clearing setting and making sure the little motor-run milage counter work. Then what i can do here is done, the second and last parts will have to cover moulding the dash into the existing Astra instrumentation surround with some glassfiber, bonding and paint, followed by actually fitting it into the car. Next time I’ll get some image reflecting the actual light, camera light-shifted a lot when using teh gels.