Quick rip

After work last night I made a pit stop at the location for Saturday’s race.  This is a brand new race and venue which is always a dangerous combination.  I wanted to scout out the key locations prior to Saturday so I wasn’t walking in there blind.  One good thing about this race is they have the start and finish lines basically in the same spot which eliminates the hassle of having to haul ass between the two points on race day while lugging a timing box or laptop.

When I got home I wanted to pull the instrument cluster from the SSR so I could ship it to the guy who is going to replace my stepper motors.  The first part of the process was removing the front dash cover, something I have had to do many, many times with my stereo install adventures.  To get the instrument cluster out only required removing four 7MM screws, should be easy, right? Not.

The bottom two screws were easily accessible and I removed them in a few seconds.  The top two were another story.  They were located down behind the hood of the cluster in a way that would not allow for a socket to get onto them conventionally.  I messed around a good 15 minutes trying to come up with some combination that worked.  I noticed that even before I started the top screws were not tight, indicating to me somebody had the cluster out once before.  I finally got the bastards out using a socket hinge adapter I had laying around and an 8MM socket that allowed me to get some traction without being completely flush on the screw.  It was a royal pain in the ass.

The last hurdle was disconnecting the wire connector for the cluster in the back which required several attempts at various angles with increasing force until I broke it loose.  I left the tools and removed parts pretty much in place since the truck will be immobile until I get the cluster back.

Of course I shot video of the process which is linked to the image above.  After editing the footage I was not all that pleased with the quality of the video my new 1080P camcorder was putting out.  After looking at the settings I discovered it was because the default quality setting for the camera was only on the 2nd out of 4 levels.  The default setting creates smaller files which I guess might be good in some situations but not important in my case.  I cranked the quality all the way up to max so future shoots should be crystal clear.