Interior - Part 3

The carbon fibre centre panel is a tricky piece to fit. It holds an auxiliary power port and the wiper washer button. It would normally hold the heater controls, but I have chosen not to fit a heater. I have also chosen to use this panel to mount the original Focus cluster on, which I will explain later in this post. First task was to enlarge the holes to hold the switches and ports. This was done with a stepper bit and a sanding wheel in the Dremel. 


With that done, I turned to the mounting bracket for the original Focus. This is an idea borrowed from a fellow Birkin builder Maurice. The mount is a right angle aluminum bracket, bolted to the top of the carbon fibre panel. From here, two stainless steel bolts go through the front of the bracket, and secure the Focus cluster through the bottom.

An aluminum bracket is passed through the top of the Focus cluster, and it runs down the front and back of the cluster, and is clipped under the bottom. Then a wide piece of aluminum is fitted over the back of this bracket and secured to the bolts from the front. This makes the mount very solid and the cluster is held tightly in place. The circle on the left at the back is the warning chime speaker, which has been "modified" to lower the volume of the warning chimes. Because the front of the cluster has all the original LED warning lights, I have covered this with rubber, which is secured by the middle aluminum bracket and the two cable ties. The rubber sheeting also acts as a damper against vibration. The LEDs need to be covered otherwise I will get unwanted light from under the dash, and it will also bleed through gaps in the dash switches at night.

With the Focus cluster mounted, the next step was to mount the carbon fibre panel in the car with the cluster on top. Here is where I have stolen another idea from another fellow Birkin builder Andrew. I riveted two 90 degree brackets on the frame, and put rivnuts in those to receive screws through the carbon fibre panel. I used a trick Andrew posted on his build diary to line these two up so I could drill the holes through the carbon fibre. This worked a treat and very soon I had the panel secure in place, and the Focus cluster wired. This step has taken a long while to do and has been fairly fiddly, but I am pretty happy with the result. Its tidy and looks professional, not that you can see it from the cockpit!

Final position from above. I will probably reroute the cables back into the tunnel and bring them up through the carbon fibre panel into the cluster.

This what it looks like from the cockpit and behind. I will paint the bolt heads black.

This is what it looks like from the passenger foot well, before the scuttle goes on.