How to Install... Total cost: $114 with shipping. |
| Begin by removing your instrument cluster and taking it to a comfortable seat in a clean area. Take the cluster apart and follow the instructions for installing the white faces carefully. The more careful you are here to pay attention to detail the better off you will be. Messy attachment job will show once they are lit up as they are not 100% opaque once lit. Just take your time and don't hurry this step. Once you have the faces installed, try putting the wires up to your car's battery to make sure everything is working ok at this point. You don't want to get everything installed only to find that you have a short somewhere inside the gauge cluster!Here's what your cluster will look like once the faces are properly installed. Pretty sharp! | |
| Once you've finished with the instrument cluster, head back into the car
and take a look at the wires you have disconnected (affectionately called
a rat's nest in my garage slang dictionary). The instructions that come
with the gauges are a little vague to those who are not experienced at automotive
electronics, like myself. There are several ways to draw power for your
new indiglo gauges but I found that the best one for me was to tap into
one of the old instrument panel lighting wires. These wires will be blue/red
on a 66 mustang. The ones you DO NOT want to cut are those of your turn
indicators and your hi beam indicator light. You will be re-using these
with your new faces so make sure you don't cut any of those wires. In the
following photo, I've indicated one of the wires that would be acceptable
to tap into. Basically all you need to do it cut the bulb attachment off
and use a wire connector to connect the now exposed wire to the red wire
from the power converter for your indiglo gauges. This is a nice way to
go if you still want to make your original headlight switch turn the new
gauges on/off. One precaution with this setup: when you are on this circuit
it is VERY IMPORTANT that you always have the instrument panel brightness
rheostat on your dash turned all they way up. Running the indiglos with
the rheostat less that at full power will damage the power converter they
use. If you want to adjust the brightness of the gauges, use only the control
box they come with. DON'T FORGET TO DISCONNECT YOUR BATTERY |
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The way I ended up doing it (and this is probably a sin to those who know what they're doing around electrical wiring) was taking all of the unnecessary bulb connectors -there are 4 of them on a 66- off the instrument loom and joining them all together along with the positive (red) wire for the indiglo power converter. Here's a photo of my preliminary joining of the wires that I used to test the setup. They have since been more permanantly connected. I figured doing it this way got rid of the extra bulb connectors that would have been floating around back there once things were all assembled. |
| So now your positive wire is connected. Now you need to find a place to attach the black (ground) wire. Under the dash there are plenty of spots where other wires are grounded and you can use any one of these locations that the indiglo's ground wire will reach. Next on the menu is finding a place to attach the power converter for your new gauge faces. In the following photo, you can see where I ended up putting mine. This location provides easy access and won't interfere with any of the other wiring, or the speedometer cable. I used velcro to attach it with for easy damage free removal. |  |
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Now you need to find a place to attach the indiglo control box to your dash (or wherever you want). I thought it looked good under the ignition switch. It's also the only place I had room! Once again I used adhesive backed velcro for the initial installation. If everything runns good for awhile, I will attach the control box more permanantly, probably with some 3m adhesive. One thing to consider with the control box is that there is no mounting hardware provided, and no room for holes drilled into the box, so you have to be creative when you attach it. |
| And for the grand finale, pull that headlight switch and give them a test. The control panel gives you the option of either blue or green. I have seen enough green instrument panels to last me a lifetime so I will stick with blue! Here's how they look all lit up in broad daylight. They are BRIGHT! It's really a simple installation and a huge improvement over the old stock gauges, and they're a heck of a lot cheaper than something like JME gauges for those on a budget. |
