Project MKIV Supra: Part 11 – New gauges and instrument panels

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And here is the panel neatly in place.  From a driver’s perspective the car is looking good for being 20-years old! 

During the installation of our freshly built engine a few parts back, we showed that we’d relocated the battery from the engine bay to the trunk.  At the time, we were using an OPTIMA 35 Redtop, which had been working great and weighs only 35-lb.  Compare that to the 40- to 50-lb norm of battery weights, and that’s a lot of weight we took out of the front of the car.  However, the RedTop was wide enough that it only fit on the left side of the trunk, and we wanted more toward the right, but there wasn’t room.  There was also a large Sony amplifier back then that didn’t allow us much room anywhere either.

The mess you see here is when we were installing a double DIN DVD player as well as the much smaller 5-channel amplifier you see, which we’d recently ordered.

Since then, we’ve switched to a taller and slimmer OPTIMA 51 Yellow Top (our Red Top went to Project E46 M3), which fit perfectly in the spot we wanted. It also gave us enough room to put the new slim amplifier where we wanted to for good weight distribution. What’s also nice is the the fact the OPTIMA Yellowtop only weighs 26-lb, and can deep cycle with up to 13.2 volts. The battery is secured with a generic $9 battery tie down kit from Advance Auto Parts.  This tie-down process simply took  drilling a couple of holes. It was super easy. 

For those with a Supra targa top who wish to stow the top in the trunk using the factory latches, the Yellowtop 51R, while it's about 1-inch taller than the Redtop, allows the targa top to fit in the normal factory location just fine!

Here's a sneak peak to some of the other things we've done to clean up the Supra's interior, including the Double DIN CD/DVD player, the steering wheel, and we've gotten rid of our blue Corbeau sets.  It's a whole different experience in this car now!

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for the second part of this interior-upgrade phase we're doing!  On the next page you'll also see more combinations of gauge cluster faces and lighting that Stu Hagen's customers ordered from him!

As always, a special thanks to these great people and companies to work this.  Please visit their site and hopefully you find some cool stuff you want to buy!

SOURCES:

AEM
AEROMOTIVE
AUTONATION TOYOTA GULF FREEWAY PARTS
CORBEAU
JHP USA
MODIFIED BY KC
OPTIMA BATTERIES
PRECISION TURBO & ENGINE
POWER HOUSE RACING
STU HAGEN SUPRA SITE
TEIN USA