:twisted: I bought the shadow box for the 6 autometer gauge cluster for my '78 that originally had the idiot lights and horizontal sweep speedo. I WOULD NOT recommend this product to anyone. It looks like a cool idea but does not fit as advertised and is poorly designed. The instructions are terrible but it wouldn't have mattered... I would have had to ruin my gauge housing to make it fit anyway, which I did.

Craig

Who's the vender. You can help him go out of business. No one likes to get stuck with a sorry product.

any pictures avail. ? i would like to see what is up with that, so i don't make the same mistake.

I am curious as well... Pics?

Is this the guy you're talking about?
http://montecarlossmanufacturing.com/81-88_montecarlo_gauge_clusters
If it is you need the the piece down towards the bottom of the page to go with the shadow box.There is also a wiring harness with the full plug and play but still doesn't include the piece at the bottom of the page.
If you don't read his stuff close it sounds like you're getting everything you need with the shadow box and he doesn't indicate otherwise.I don't like this kind of thing because it gets you to buy one thing then you realize you need other parts or you have to mod something up to work and it just slows the project down and if it's your only driver you're screwed.

The way that a '78 works is that the gauge cluster housing protrudes from the dash about 2" plus another inch or so for the facing. The 5 gauge configuration would work fine and the product is well made. However, to get the 6 gauge cluster to work I had to cut out the side of the existing cluster housing. I am still thinking about the solution that I will have to come up with, but it would have been much better to use a tach/speedo combo and use 5 gauges. It would have easily fit. I used Autometer gauges and they work well and look great. I can't see the hole that I cut in the cluster housing, so as long as I don't have a passenger in the truck or park the truck so that there's no room to stand on the right side, everything looks great! :let_it_all_out:

Here is the link to what I am talking about. My cluster looks just like the pics. I will take a pic of what I had to do to get it to work and post it here, but I'm no amateur and there wasn't a way to get this to work... you can't shift the gauges to the left far enough to avoid the inset between the front and the back of the original gauge cluster housing. The way that the autometer gauges mount to the shadow box you would have to cut off the mounting bracket of one of the big gauges to avoid this problem which is not a good idea.

http://montecarlossmanufacturing.com/78-80_malibu__el_camino_gauge_clusters

Craig