For a while now I've been trying to figure out the best place to keep my sunglasses and/or night driving glasses (the only downside of me getting eye lasers) when I don't need them. For a while I kept them in their cases in the glove box but that took up too much room and was inconvenient to access while driving. My husband's Genesis Coupe has one of those nifty overhead consoles with the fold down bit for this exact purpose and I thought "why didn't we get one of those?"
So I popped the dome light out and did some measuring. Turns out there's a lot of room between the front part of the headliner and the center support on the roof! Armed with my measurements, a screwdriver, and some wire cutters I made my way to the local pick-n-pull yard to rummage through some cars.
After several attempts to find cars that had these type of consoles (preferably with integrated map lights), pulling them down, measuring them, finding out most of them didn't stand a chance of fitting, and repeating I came up with three options. The contenders were one from a 350Z, one from an early '00s Honda Odyssey, and one from an second gen Tiburon. I pulled them out, cut the pigtails for the connectors, and headed to the counter. I wound up spending less than $25 for all of this ($3 to get in
and $19.xx for the parts).
The consoles from the Z and the Odyssey were beige and the one from the Tiburon was black. In addition to saving myself the effort of sanding down and painting them, the overall shape of the Tiburon's console was the best match. The Odyssey console was a close runner up, however, because it had Homelink buttons built in.
The particular Tiburon I amputated the console from was a non-sunroof model so it has blanks where the sunroof buttons would otherwise have been... more on this later.
With the help of
this thread by @
nalc (
) I pulled the headliner and got to work.
The fit was almost perfect.
The first step was to cut down the foam block between the headliner and the roof.
After that was out of the way I made a rough template out of a file folder, marked where I needed to cut (making sure I would be leaving the little white clip at the front to hold the headliner up), and made a big hole in my headliner. I used one of those oscillating cutters to cut through the plastic bits and a utility knife made quick work of the headliner itself. If I were to do it again, I would have just cut out the chunk of headliner from the donor car to use as a template, but whatevs.
I checked the fit and realized there were a couple little plastic tabs that poked up too high.
Off they went!
Adventure continued below...