Alright! I forgot to grab a picture, but I did grab a decent condition dash from the junk yard over the weekend! It is from a 1994, which did have a 1.5 DIN stereo originally, and also had the little vents/ducting in the lower doghouse cover as well as I found small vents on the far outer ends of the dashboard. Good news is that from what I can tell, all of the additional ducting in the newer models is tied to the 'floor' ducting, and doesn't appear to affect the upper dash vents or ducting. I guess time will tell..
There is definitely some significant ducting directly behind the upper vents. I'm still pondering how to handle that but I think that will be the biggest speedbump. I'm going to get better pictures of the specifics tonight.
Alright. Here is my mock-up dash. This is from a 1.5 din stereo. Compared to my original single DIN, the metal bracket behind the stereo is different, but once I cut out the radio/vent area, the hole should be the same. The metal beacket is going to have to be cut or modified for either version in order to fit a double DIN and vents, so I'll need to figure out a solution for that which still provides necessary support for the dash.
The ducting behind the dash is a somewhat complex shape. But the duct going to the driver's side is a separate part, so as long as that can attach to the new duct, that can remain unchanged along with the small duct that comes off and points towards the floor
I figure that I will probably remove the passenger side duct and then have to design a duct to fill in that area while clearing a double DIN stereo as well as providing air to the repositioned center vents.. This is going to get pretty complex. Fingers crossed.
Good luck! Pretty cool to see the backside of that dash. I’m so used to building HVAC so I’m surprised that they went through all the trouble of custom forming all that stuff behind it, but then again, probably never guessed there’d be guys wanting to hack it up
Right! There is a part of me that is thinking about just using PVC pipe and 3d printing adapters to mate it to the existing ducting.. We'll see, like everything else I touch, this will be a slow process.