NEW DASHBOARD

Yes, I finally did it... oh man. Loooong boring story. When I bought my car, it had several cracks, it was one of the worst E30 dashboards I have seen since. Let's just say it could have been used as supporting evidence for more than a few seismology dissertations.

And the cracks were driving me NUTS. I have no idea why, but it's a bummer. I think the horizontal flow of a dash really contributes to a car's interior. I know in that earlier Mercedes Benz cars, the strong dash really gave me a lot of confidence... like, "wow what a solid car".

So, the cracked dash kind of did the opposite... I thought about getting a dash cap, but sort of thought, oh man, you'd hate yourself later, and a crack free used dash is pretty cheap. How hard could it possibly be to install?

Naturally, the next thoughts were like this: as long as I am taking out the dash, there's probably some stuff I should do while it's out. After all, it's a big deal, etc. So, I had this list:

• New instrument cluster (my first instrument cluster had a busted gears, my second motometer cluster had bad lights and a balky SI board) so I finally got two 3.3v NiMh batteries, two 3-watt bulbs, and a lower mileage VDO cluster.
• I soldered the batteries in, dealt with what bulbs I could, and contemplated colored gauge/dial faces. Lame, but I like them. I would have either gotten silver or yellow dials. Someday I'm going to have these guys do custom MPH only dials in that really hot 911 style type.
• 13 button OBC computer. My car, like all US 318is cars, shipped with the very lame 6 button OBC. I longed for the 13 button OBC. Call me nuts, but whatever. Unfortunately, its more complicated than just plugging in a new OBC unit. I had to buy the whole frigging kit, including the 13 button panel, new wiring harness and the coding plug for the 318is, a special order item from europe. Ugh.
• Dash vents. My cracked dash had the world's laziest dash vents. E30 owners will know what I speak of.
• Heater panel; my heater panel had a cracks and minor imperfections, plus the bulbs were out on both the left and the right side.
• Front speakers... taking the left hand side speaker cover off is a minor pain, related to removing the various bolster covers etc. I bought low profile blaupunkt 5.25" speakers, thinking they would be better, but I think the cheaper pioneers in the back sound better... although it may be my head unit too (amp is puking).
• Foglight wiring. My car didn't (still doesn't) have foglights, so I needed to install the foglight switch, replace the bulb behind the headlight switch, and find the wiring plug for the switch, which was conveniently taped to the wiring behind the SRS controller.

Doing the dashboard is, well, lets just say it is the biggest friggin pain in the ass in the entire world. That's probably not true, but I hope that I'm never proven wrong via personal experience. If someone knows of a bigger ass-pain, please tell me about it and I will retract my statement.

Well, anyway, I also want to send a shout out to three extremely courageous individuals who did very detailed writeups on the dash swap:

E30325i on Mwerks.com

StrictlyETA.com

Chris Deegan (very studly)

I actually got the replacement dashboard in August from the Euro Depot, and I tried installing it in august, outdoors, with no Bentley and no internet writeup. I didn't get very far. I got a little farther along, because I did some work on the instrument cluster and installed the ebay ECU chip. So, basically, all that needed to figure out was the HVAC panel and the center console bits.

I also bid on another dashboard on ebay, which the seller claimed was 'brand new BMW, never installed' but it turned out to either be a scam, or an extremely crappy seller. The dash never arrived and well, here we are.

Pulling the dash out takes time, and it's a little weird to see the entire cockpit disassembled. It actually looks a little worse in the picture... the wiring tends to take care of itself after you get going.

Anyway... we'll see how everything turned out in Part II.