Light & more Space under the Flying Bridge

Ever since I got a Stage 10 shifter in Summer 2012, I wanted to eliminate the useless fist-size plastic roof bulge under the flying bridge.

In late December I found my son's former motorcycle parts bin in the basement (the Hedgehog is now Ford Fusion Energi-equipped and living in Kentucky). Among other stuff, there they were - his old LED motorcycle license plate "bolts". Ha haa!

Well, any holiday project worth its salt doesn't get done until January. Here are some pix: the Flying Bridge in silhouette without the old shifter bulge (much neater IMHO), the li'l nub of the LED "bolt", the LED bolt lit up, and its sister LED bolt next to my watch for scale.

A shoutout to the Stage 10 crew who told me which shifter wires to tap (Toyota OEM side, not/not the Stage 10 side of the connecting plug). There are two white wires on the OEM side - the white wire toward the center (not the one on the very edge) provides 12 Volt power while the only red wire is the Ground.

In-the-dark pix will follow when it gets dark tonight. I hope the level of light is just right - not too bright, but bright enough to be useful.

My motivation: to be able to find little things on the compartment floor on long trips in the night without rooting around. As a bonus, I Dremeled the now-useless plastic "fist bulge" off the roofline and closed the gap with a stiff black plastic piece and six rivets.

Challenges: disassembling 1/2 of the flying bridge to cautiously get everything right. There are some finicky weird metal welded pieces in there. I suggest asking the friendly Toyota parts guy to print you off a schematic of the Flying Bridge parts (all on one page) which makes things much less guess-like during disassembly.

Electrical stuff: straightforward once the plastic surgery w/rivets is done. No surprises there.

 

My apologies to all - I noticed after posting that i didn't orient the pix correctly. I'll edit now.

 

Actually I'd love to except I need the shifter.

 

Exactly correct. The OEM shifter has a mechanical pivot point with the visible stick above it and a corresponding length of it hidden in the bulge below the pivot point. Since the shifting (either shifter) is actually controlled by electronic fly-by-wire contacts, once the mechanical "choosing of contacts" is transferred from stick-moving (OEM) to button-pushing (Stage 10), the "roof bulge" under the flying bridge is just empty space.

It's easy to see in any GenIII Prius, whatever shifter is installed: just pry up the large silver triangular plastic bezel which wraps around the shifter with your fingers or maybe a dull edge like a butter knife, from the left (driver's knee) side. It comes right up and thee you see the OEM shifter mechanism and the space enclosed by the plastic "roof bulge" underneath.
The Stage 10 shifter is essentially a flat pancake so it actually just floats in the top of the empty space within the flying bridge's center.

 

Good job to you as well. Had I been more motivated I'd have hunted up a blue LED to match my EXLEDUSA overall blue cabin lighting (BTW the EXLEDUSA Pius kit is a great and easy-to-install mod). As it is, reuse of my son's LED bike bolt also gives just the right amount of light to see and locate items on the cargo shelf without being a visual distraction at night. Being a license plate LED bolt, of course its light is white but hey it was free and it was here, ya know?

 

Oh BTW if anyone out there is looking for an OEM Gen III shifter just PM me. Free to a good home.

 

When I took apart all the plastic for the Flying Bridge to install my motorcycle LED license bolt light under it, I realized that apart from all the plastic panels and the wiring for the three engine control buttons and the shifter, the FB contains nothing except a really clumsily, complexly designed set of interlocking metal plates - IMHO for longitudinal torsion stability of the FB itself. In that light, the issue is more of how to finish off the remaining "abutments" of the FB once it's cut out so that they are visually acceptable rather than any internal structural reinforcement. Of course, relocating the three traction buttons and the shifter present their own problems. I think a switch to a bush button shifter like the Stage 10 etc. would make this mod easier, because pushbutton shifters require almost no depth.

If you ever do it I'd love to see a write-up + pics.