This picture shows my first attempt to 'mock up' a digital dashboard for my Mk3 Golf TDI. I cut the electronics off an old dashboard cluster and then sanded away the back of the bezel, leaving a nice 'cluster shaped' opening. I bought a DVD player with a 12.1” widescreen TFT in it (sadly, its lit by CFL not LED - but its the only 12.1” panel I could lay my hands on). The panel uses 3 channel LVDS. Here you see my hack of the DVD display board, connecting it to my laptop and displaying an image. The bezel is sat on top the display.

Next I cut out a piece of MDF about 0.5mm larger than the TFT panel all round (1mm overall) and sanded the edges to a smooth finish. This piece of MDF was then placed behind the bezel, which I re-attached in the dashboard. I drew an outline on the MDF at both the highest position and the lowest position in which the panel would fit. The minimum differencce between the positions appeared to be about 8mm so I chose to mount the bezel in the centre of this range. This turned out to be a mistake because a) the panel can actually sit lower than I managed to get it to go (Dont know why, perhaps a cable was trapped beneath it) and b) because I forgot to take into account the eventual thickness of my fibreglass piece.

The next step was to cover the MDF in clingfilm so that the fibreglass resin would not adhere to it. I also put a smear of silicone around the base of the bezel and used the bezel to print this below and on top of the clingfilm. After this had set it held the bezel in place well enough that I did not have to worry about it slipping during the application of the fibreglass gauze and resin.

I chose a 'tissue' fibreglass weave as it would result in a thinner border around my display. Even so, the space behind the bezel is incredibly cramped near the top - if I had adjustable height steering, the bottom of the panel would quite likely foul the mechanism. The excess weave and the resin that had dripped was cut away using a dremel-type cutting disc in order to release it from the MDF mould and the remainder was sanded in order to give a nice flat finish.

Attention to detail can make or break a project like this. Here you can see a consquence of the technique I used to obtain a nice crisp line around the border of the bezel. the mounting lugs have been sanded approximately in half and the rubber grommit no longer fits snugly. This would lead to undesireable 'shuddering' of the bezel whe nthe motor is idling, and possibly, longer term, damage to the LCD panel.

My solution to the problem was to cut the lugs from another cluster and sand them down to make a matching replacement for the material lost from the original lugs. These 'half lugs' were then superglued in place.

Lastly, I applied quick setting 2-part epoxy to fill the small gap between the end of the 'half-lug' and the casing, leaving a nice smooth and strong joint, as you can see.

To the Left is the finished bezel, displaying the VGA output from my laptop. To the right, you can see the bezel mounted in my dashboard. In order to mount it, it was necessary to cut away about 2mm from each of the lower mounting pivot recesses in the dashboard, to allow for the additional thickness of fibreglass down the edge of the bezel. This is not so much that the original cluster wont fit - and the two screws still locate the old cluster correctly as well.