Last time we looked at cramming the Hayabusa's instrument cluster into the Miata housing, it proved to be a shockingly good fit. There was a very large unresolved issue of how to actually secure the Hayabusa cluster's circuit board, though. Here's how that project was finished:
At the end of the last installment, this was what we had. A circuit board rattling around in a mutilated Miata housing. It didn't take long to decide the circuit board looked too cool to cover up, but I still needed some way to hold it in place securely.
In its original home, the Hayabusa cluster was sandwiched into a plastic housing, with seven little plastic pins indexing into 7 holes in the circuit board to locate it.
Those holes were just big enough for a 5mm bolt. I used nylon washers on either side of the circuit board to keep the bolt from shorting something out, and threaded a long, coupling nut onto the end of the bolt.
That coupling nut left a threaded hole to use for mounting. Since the back of the Miata cluster housing was irregular, each bolt had to be a different length. Since there was nothing secure for the bolt to tighten the cluster up against, I used a short section of vacuum hose as a mount.
Each of these hose-based rubber mounts was also a different length.
To make assembly easier, after test fitting, each hose was glued down to the housing. Assembly is still a delicate operation, but once all seven bolts are in place, it's quite secure.
Things are less pretty out back, where a hatchet is required to open up a big enough hole to push the little button that releases the connector from the back of the cluster. From here you can also see the giant fender washer that was required behind one of the circuit board mounting holes when one of the 7 bolts landed in a big hole.
As always, all this ugliness is easily fixed with a little flat black spray paint. The magic can makes the ugly white plastic housing disappear into the background, and covers up all the glue we used to reassemble the housing.
Ironically, the Hayabusa's cluster looks dramatically better crammed into a Miata than it ever did in that cheezy faux-carbon plastic box Suzuki housed it in. I suspect the same will be true of the engine…
All the Miatabusa you can handle:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
