Chrome Dial Rings and Red Needles

After a rather long hiatus in updates on the car, I decided to start small. The dials and general clock area wasn't the most exciting part of the car as standard, and as you spend quite a lot of time looking in this area, I decided it needed a bit of a facelift.

Having installed chrome dial rings on my old car and seeing the difference it made, I thought that would be a great start.


I ordered the kit from eBay for the bargain price of £13.79 delivered. They are great quality and fitting was very simple too. No glue required at all, just clip them into the housing and off you go.

Here's the pictures of just the chrome rings installed, apologies for the poor after picture.

Before and After




As you can see, already it is much improved, adding to the premium feel of the car.

Next I decided to add a bit of colour, you might have read about this mod nick named "the Sharpie mod". Basically it involves using a marker pen to recolour the instrument needles red (or a colour of your choice). I believe the M3 came with factory red needles, could be wrong though.

After searching everywhere for a chisel tip red Sharpie I gave up and just bought a chisel tip Pentel permanent marker for £1.39 from Rymans.

Weapon of choice


Taking the instrument cluster back out again, I carefully disassembled it to reveal the dials and needles.











Once exposed I took a good look at the needles and discovered they were different to how I imagined, and this actually made the job easier. I originally though I'd have to colour the sides of the needles as well as the top face. Turns out the top face is the only white bit, the sides are transparent.


So only needing to colour the top, I placed some paper towel carefully under the needle so if I missed I didn't ruin my expensive instrument cluster. Then tentatively set to work colouring in.




The process is actually fairly forgiving, and I was quickly done. However, with the larger needles I wasn't overly happy with the finish, so I re-coated those which was a bit of a faff to be honest. Nevertheless I got them all to a standard I was happy with and reassembled.








For some reason my camera makes the red look overly vibrant, in reality it is slightly less saturated.





And finally here is the instrument cluster reinstalled in the car, a massive improvement in my opinion. It also looks great at night, with no light loss, and even better at dawn. A very worthwhile mod in my opinion.






Night shots






Dawn shots