Refreshing the S14 Digital Climate Control

The S14 Digital Climate control, is definitely a cool piece to have if you have a non gutted s-chassis and didn't decide to run gauges in your center vents like most people did in the 90's and early 20000's. 

I think one of the biggest gripes about this piece is that it does not match the color of the center vent panel at all, it's a completely different shade of gray. I am not sure why the manufacturer Zexel did this. But I tried various things to try and spruce up my unit and I think it came out pretty good. Just came at a cost of a lot of trial and error. 

It's mentioned in the Climate Control How To but this is what I did to re-seat the buttons on the unit as it's 25 year old plastic and they will break. 

First mistake I made was trying to mask the buttons with painters tape and taking an xacto knife trying to mask the icons. I ended up gouging all of the buttons, This ultimately caused me to buy a second unit for 50 bucks on ebay to have as parts. 

Soooooo that sucked, I contemplated having stickers made to put over the buttons. But because it's a one off job and my buddy was honest and said they probably wont be great but it's doable. I figured since we've already got a spare unit, lets see how far we can abuse my original one. 

At least I got to paint the surround and that came out pretty good, but it really highlighted how shitty the buttons looked. 

My next bright idea was to try and spray the paint into a dish and try to paint it on with a brush... That went horribly lmao. 

here is the one I've been working on, on top and the spare unit on the bottom. Really not sure what to do at this point about the buttons, the bezel came out pretty good, I ended up taking an 80 grit sanding block to get the bulk of the paint off and to see how far down I could go on the buttons before the buttons went completely white on me. I guess the way they were made it's two colors all the way through. So you can sand to your hearts content. I went in with 120 grit after, and then 1000 grit to smooth them out. 

I tried a matte clear, so it still looked like "plastic" but it was ungodly sticky. 

I mean the buttons looked a lot better but seriously felt like the unit was dipped in honey. Maybe it takes a really long time for the matte clear to flash. 

So I sanded the unit down again, this time I slowly did light mists of the matte black paint and etched the paint off of the letters on all of the buttons. It was going great, I now needed to fill in all of the letters. So I bought some nail enamel, turns out whatever is in nail enable doesn't play nice with whatever is in this interior paint and it started to eat it. So I sanded all of the buttons down, AGAIN. And just tried to put gloss nail enamel. 

It's not perfect, and I guess I was striving to make it that. It still has a weathered look to it, but at least it matches the center vent panel a lot more now. 

the finished one is on the bottom here

this is the stock gray against the center vent panel. Almost has a hint of brown in it.

here is the final product. 

I would've liked the panel and the buttons texture to match, but I guess with the lcd screen it kinda goes with the buttons being darker and more of a shiny plastic while the surround is more in line with the color of the center vent panel. 

I dig it, most people won't even notice something like this let alone the fact the digital climate control isn't an oem part in the US. 

It's more of a IYKYK mod.