sandman

Finally had a nice day to take some pics of my P5. Went off road in a field behind my work to find a decent spot that wouldn't have parking lot or buildings showing up in the pics...

Click here or the link on my sig to go to the album.

The tint is 35% on the sides, 23% on the back.
You can also see the work I've done so far on the dome and map light and the slightly different gaugeface colors.

IMO the orange is ALOT easier to read than the gross red that mazda has by default. Those pics don't really do it justice cuz my digicam sux pants at taking night pictures. All I did with it though was removed the color condoms off the lights in the gauge pod.

Aaron

looks good. so you had to take your dash apart to get to those gauge lights then? that looks pretty good. might match my stereo better cause my lights on that are orange. let me know how you did that if you can.........

sandman

Not the whole dash - just the gauegpod section.

follow Negatize's instructions to pull the gaugepod out:
http://www.protegeclub.com/forum/sho...ghlight=orange

Then you just gotta pop out all the lights from the back and pull off the colored condoms from the ones that have them on.

My next big thing is to figure out how the HELL to get the needles off the face without breaking them.

H2SO4

just wondering, is it possible to replace the red or orange dash lights with a bright blue or green? never taken apart a p5 dash

thanks...looks really good

sandman

Working on it.. You can change the bulbs or paint them, but you're going to have a messed up color because the gauge faces have an orange film on them as well. Mazda used a 2 step process to get the red dash on the P5. Colored rubber 'condoms' that went overtop the bulb and the orange film on the gauge face. Combined they make that disgusting red that I found was incredibly hard to look at. What you see in my after pics (they don't do the actual look justice) are the bulbs with the condoms removed. All the orange color is coming from the film behind the gauges... I find the orange look 1000 times easier to look at than the red that was there before, but ultimatly I want blue gauge faces to match my blue theme...

The problem is you can't remove the needles to get the gauge faces off to scrape the orange film off.

Apparently it can be done, but I haven't worked up the nerve to take the risk of breaking my needles...

Bruce95fmla

looks pretty good man , good work with the pics, i like what you did with the dome lights

H2SO4

anyone seen these? would they fit an mp5?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eb...996088&r=0&t=0

Maz94Protege

Love the Orange Dash. its original and different. i give u credit on that.

Maz94Protege

Most likly. all 3rd gen dash clusters are the same. event P3 and P5's. Make sure u specify WITH or WITHOUT tach.!!!!

azrakain

they will fit. It shows on his website. They are a bitch to install though because you gotta remove those needles. I wouldn't try it. The guages are like $250 or more if I remember correctly. Someone on this board broke two sets of guage needles and had to buy new clusters everytime.