creekman

I decided to remove the rear seats out of my 2003 C4S and eventually build a shelf with doors, i.e. the RS kit (?) that was sold at one time. I would sure like to get my hands on the doors shown in this pix. Anyway, the purpose of this "mod" is to utilize the tear drop opening where the shoulder strap of the seat belt was anchored. My first thought was to just install a piece of painted sheet metal behind the opening, then I came up with the idea to make the opening an interior light. A friend of mine gave me a 12" square of 1/8" white plexi. It turns out that the backside of the opening isn't flat so I had to first cut out the shape on the band saw with about 3/8" over lap on the bottom of the opening and a fitted edge to the top of the opening. Then I heated the plastic so I could warp the plexi piece for fitment to the backside of the opening. Not slam dunk, it's trial and error to get the shape to lay down on the back side of the plastic piece. Naturally if you had a mirrored shaped block of wood you could just heat the plexi and drape it over your fixture. Also remember there's a left and right so it would take two fixtures. So I just heated and bent the plastic to make a pretty good fit. Note you have to be careful not to dent the plastic when it's hot with pliers or a Crescent wrench. I used a ViseGrip with wide jaws that are covered in leather. I think if you had 1/16" plexi it would work better than my 1/8", I might add that I used a red Magic Marker to fine tune the fit. It seems to me that the black Magic Marker really gets into the material and it's hard to remove even with lacquer thinner. Once I had the fit, I sanded the shiny plexi with 1200 wet or dry sand paper to remove the gloss. Then used black RTV silicone and glued the lens to the back of the Porsche upholstery. I bought a strip of white LED's that has a self adhesive back. I just stuck the strips directly to the car body. I haven't wired the lights up yet, however I did light them up, I'm very pleased with the look and the light. I'm thinking I might wire the LED's into theinterior door lights so I don't have to worry about a separate switch and leaving the lights on. If you wanted to get weird you can buy LED's that can change colors. Remotes are available to rotate the color of preference if that's your thing. FYI: You can get these LED strips on-line from superbrightled.com - P/N NFLS-NW30X3-WHT - Natural White. These LED's run on 12 volts so you don't need power pack, just 12 Volts to the strips. The strips come 19" long with 2 leads, I cut the strips down to 6 LED's per side,then soldered + and - leads to the other strip. The strips are polarity sensitive, but they're well marked.