I recently purchased a 2007 Nissan Versa and temporarily jammed my scangauge in the little cubbyhole over the radio. The original plan was to make a pod that would be on the dash containing the SG and a couple other gauges but I liked having the SG off to the side where it was.
I flipped the door open and closed a few times, looked at the dimensions of the SG and decided it would be totally doable to put the SG in the flip door, have it look good and still have access to the cubby.
Once I decided what I wanted to do the first step was to remove the trim and cubby from the vehicle. The online videos said to lift and pull the top trim until it pops out. Unfortunately I lifted a bit too much and broke a couple mounts, nothing a bit of super-glue can’t fix.
The Trim bit with the cubby in it came out very easily after removing two screws at the top, then I ground down the “welds” at the bottom of the cubby and removed that as well.
Next I took apart the SG itself and ground down the lip on the front so it was a uniform thickness all around and flattened and reduced the thickness of the back plate.
I then cut a rough hole in the middle of the door going as low as I could. Once that was cut out I made it just large enough that I could fit the front of the SG into the hole with a bit of pressure on either side. I was happy to find that my first cuts were all within 1mm of the correct size.
After test fitting the SG I screwed on the back plate then tried to plug it in. I sort of forgot about having to be able to plug it in and had to trim a bit more of the door and the end of the cord to make it work.
I made a hole in the top edge of the cubby, fed the cord through, glued the cord in place on the door, fed the OBDII plug through the dash and installed everything back in place.
Overall I am quite happy with the result. The cord hangs down into the cubby space a bit more than I would like when the door is up but I should be able to fix that with a couple more holes and a zip-tie and still have enough flexibility to let everything move.
Other than that, I have a perfectly functional cubby with a scangauge that looks like it belongs on the door.
