Had a local customer contact us a few weeks ago inquiring about our NAV-CAM rear camera system. He wanted to know all about it, what it does, the different components includes...ect. After a a few phone calls and emails, he decided to come by and take a look at the NAV-CAM in person.

To our surprise he pulled up in a Honda Civic. I say surprised because this system is mostly geared towards the truck & SUV crowd. Mainly because the camera enclosure is made from aluminum and requires a bumper or hitch to mount it to. This was going to be a fun install due to most cars, the Civic included, have a fiberglass bumper, and nothing solid in the rear to mount the camera to. Adding to the dilemma, he wanted the monitor mounted in his dash. That being said, what the customer wants, he gets. If it doesn't fit, make it fit.

So....here is what was done to make it work on a Civic.

Step 1.Take monitor that is 3.5" x 3.25" x .75" and fit it in the dash...somehow. The obvious spot had to be the cubby hole. But still, fitting a square monitor into a spot that is not even close to being a square hole will be a challenge.






The only choice was to remove the guts from the monitor. By eliminating the monitor casing, that moved our measurements down to 3.25" x 3.0" x .5". Not a big improvement, but a must in this case.





Step 2. Figure out how to get the monitor guts in the cubby hole area. We removed the cubby hole which left us with some room to work with. Then we removed the frame that surrounds the AC controls, stereo and vents to get a better look at what we were dealing with. We used a dremel tool to remove excess plastic and cut a notch just below the right side vent to allow the monitor screen to be inserted up and inside the dash.


Here you can see the monitor inserted into dash. The notch we cut will allow the thickest part of the monitor to be pushed up and in. The white line represents how much monitor is actually pushed up through the notch we cut. The control board for the monitor is actually behind the dash tied to 2 of the dash support frames back behind the dash.




So now the monitor is in the dash, we made a face plate using some 16 gauge sheet aluminum and cut out a faceplate that would fit in this area filling in the dash and allowing the monitor screen to be visible. We painted it black to match the dash.



Here is the face plate inserted into dash to help hide the fact that the dash was modified and to hide the metal casing of the monitor.




Now that we have the dash all back together with the monitor mounted and secured, it was time to move onto the bigger issue of getting the bullet camera mounted to the back of the vehicle. Not too many options here since the entire rear of the vehicle is plastic or fiberglass except for the trunk lid.

Here you can see the color bullet camera which is 2.9" long with a diameter of .990". The only logical area we could think of to mount the camera which also provided a solid surface to anchor too was the rear section near the license plate.







We thought about it and decided that to keep the rear of the vehicle as stock looking as possible, and to keep the balance if not add more balance, we would mount the camera in the same area as the trunk lock but on the opposite side of the license plate.



Step 3. Before we started hacking into the rear of the vehicle, we knew that we would have to come up with a solid enclosure of some kind that the camera could be inserted into and also fastened to the vehicle and secured. Since the camera lens would be flush with the rear of the vehicle, we needed a special enclosure that would reside on the inside lid of the trunk back behind the license plate area.

We tried a few different approaches to getting a quality enclosure made with aluminum flat bar, channel bar, round bar but nothing seemed to work the way we needed it to since all of these choices had 1 dimension to work with. IE, it was either flat, square or round. We needed all of those characteristics but from one solid piece. Our only choice was to make what we needed by hand.

We started out with a 3" long piece of T6 6061 aluminum round rod that was 1.75" in diameter. We chose 6061 because it machines very easily. Here we have our 3" piece of 1.75" diameter 6061 aluminum round rod. We placed it in the drill press and used a 1" annular cutter to bore a hole through the middle.



After we had our 1" hole cut through the middle, we had to add some flat and square surfaces to it to accept brackets and lock screws to secure the camera inside the hole we just cut.

Step 4. Let the trusty Sherline mill take care of it. Here you can see the mill taking the round rod down to a square finish. This will enable us to drill small holes on the flat surfaces and tap them to accept lock screws which will secure the camera inside of the enclosure and keep it from twisting or falling out.



Here is our finished piece. Looks pretty nice.




Step 4. Prepare rear of vehicle to accept camera and enclosure by removing plastic panel from rear. Remove all clips, nuts and screws that hold this piece onto trunk lid.







Now we have the panel off, we cut a piece of cardboard that is the same shape as the panel for a template. We drew a mark on the cardboard template through the keyhole. We punched a hole though the board where we made our mark, flipped the plastic over and put the template on top of the plastic but where the hole would be over the other side rather than being where the keyhole is. This would allow us to make a mark on the panel on the opposite side of the keyhole so our camera would be in the same position as the keyhole but on the opposite side of the license plate.

Here we are using a 1 3/8 hole saw to cut our hole through the panel. Into this hole we will place a grommet that has an outside diameter of 1 3/8", and inside diameter of .995" This grommet will fill our hole and allow our .990" diameter camera to be inserted with a close fit.





Step 5. Insert camera through grommet, add our camera enclosure and mount to inside of trunk lid.



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