I've had my tomtom since Christmas and have just had it sitting in my ashtray. It worked well there but didn't look to nice and the shift lever would hit it when placed in park so I decided to make it a little more custom. Check out the pics below.

It works very well, it's very stable and I think it doesn't look bad. I have a tomtom Go 720 that has an mp3 player so I was able to wire it to the cd changer sound inputs. Now all I have to to is select cd mode on the Mercedes headunit and I have gigs of mp3's at my finger tips.

How do you guys think it looks?

 

Two more photos, in night mode...

 

thats slick brother! looks good!

 

Not bad man! Do you plan on cleaning it up a little more?

 

Yeah I plan on finishing the top with black felt also. My knife was to dull to cut the clean angle need for the curve on the top of the tomtom.

Do you have any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them?

 

Disastrous, appalling, rip it all out at once!

I mean, what?

No ashtray!!

Supposing you want to smoke? You'll have to go in the back and then you can't drive!

Only joking, old chap. Nicely done.

RayH

PS: Home alone at present and found a pack of 5 Marlboro! I'd had a few G&Ts and some wine with dinner so I smoked em! First time for ages. Made me feel like some big-time law-breaker. Quite enjoyed really. Oh well!

 

Nice Job! My worry would be someone trying to steal it!

 

yea, i almost did the same thing, but i hate the fact that there are people out there who probably would try and steal it.

but it looks clean man. good job

 

Looks 90% awesome! The other 10% would be acheived by either color matching the end filler pieces with the wood (take one part to home depot and have them match the color, then paint plastic filler pieces) or color match to the interior beige.

Great work!!

 

My only suggestion other than what you had planned is color matching like zorro said. The wood would be kinda hard to get looking right, but you could also try your interior color.

Actually, another suggestion would be to implicate some type of sliding door or cloth (from the top or bottom). Or even a folding double door (from each side) that you would be able to close and not have to worry about people peeking in there or the sun messing up the screen from too much exposure.

 

Thanks guys, I'm glad everyone likes it.

I like the suggestions about matching it to the interior. Does anyone know were I could starting looking for matching materials, my interior is parchment?

Attached is a pic of someone else's handy work. He matched his interior very well, although I think he had the whole center console recovered from the stitching that is shown in the photo.

 

You should be able to pop off the little triangle pieces adjacent to the side mirrors. See right next to the passenger side vent in this pic:



Once you pop that off, take it to home depot and have it color matched or go to a fabric store and find color matched vinyl etc....

 

That's a great idea, thanks.

 

That looks very good, just find some mathcing pieces as zorro suggested and finish it off.


This is what I'm after.

 

Speaking of that triangular piece Mark..

Is it possible to make a tweeter box/thing out of fiberglass to fit there? Has anyone done it that you know of?

 

ha... when i had my legend i used to roll to fabric stores carrying the head rest so i could find some vinyl that would come close to matching!

 

Yeah you did!

 

The only problem I see is that it is so far away from your immediate field of vision. The nice thing about having them mounted higher, such as on the windshield or as with the new C and S class models is that it takes very little time to shift from looking at the road, to looking at the screen... Nice idea though.

 

I'm thinking about going the liliput touchscreen/Car PC route down the road, currently my gps sits exactly where your does. Nice work, I'd do a color match like Zorro recommended.

 

A friend of mine voice that same concern. A nice thing about the tomtom 720 is that it has text to speech, so after I set the route I have to look at the screen very little. Instead of it saying "turn left in 500 ft" it says "in 500 ft turn left on main street." The speech is pretty clear; I've only had two or three times that I wasn't able to understand what it was saying.

Besides my OCD like tendencies prevent my from having it on the windshield. I can't stand cords hanging all over the place and I always fiddle with them if their there. I agree though that it would be ideal to have it higher up.

 

Thats cool, I've been toying around with the car pc idea for a few years now, i just haven't been able to come up with the perfect plan yet.