I'm going to be adding a few electronic bits and pieces to the 1959 Cadillac and will need new switches to control things. I'd like to find switches that I can mount somewhere easy to reach and yet they still look like they should be there... would prefer to avoid having to hide them under the dash or in the glove box. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Additional lighting mainly... 1. Will be converting to new headlights that have high and low functionality in the one light... with 4 headlights that means twice the output of a normal car... which is good but I want a switch to kill the inner two lights when they're not necessary. 2. Controls for fog lights in the lower bumper. 3. Eventually an electric sliding soft sunroof but it will take some time before I can do that! 4. Possibly controls for some parking cameras, to select front or rear camera for example. 5. Planning to hide a GPS display in the ash-tray - may need a switch for that but was going to try to use a plunger thing so it automatically powers up when the tray drops down.
I'd go with a floor dimmer and maybe some factory type push/pull switches for your car. do a neat job installing and they should look like they belong.
The stock headlights did just that, high/low beam on the outers and high only on the inner. Change the old sealed beam units out for halogen lenses and bulbs, relays will alow you to use the original headlight swith and the stock floor dip switch is so easy to use I don't know why cars don't still have em. You then still have the insrument dimmer and interior light function all on the same switch. The bumper light lenses are probably not too good as fog lights, I fitted amber bulbs to the outers for indicators.
I did this with my fogs 1) single speed wiper switch with 1) original spare knob It looks stock and it works fine. only suck part is I couldn't add an idiot light to it.
All of the aftermarket switches I've seen would not fit the '59 Cadillac style. Things that cross my mind. Are you running stock A/C? They have two sets of contols. One on each side of the steering coulmn. If you change to aftermarket A/C, You can put all the contols into one of the two factory panels and use the other one for whatever switches that you want. If you could get the two (A/C and other switches) to have the same look, you would have something that wouldn't be that noticable and would at least match. I'll see if I can round up some pics of some '59 Cad stuff I've done.
If you get a GPS unit it should automatically switch to the backup camera, many aftermarket cameras get power from the backup lamp circut anyway. Many GPS units will also have an option to switch between 2 or more inputs (cameras/DVD/or?)
I like that idea... seen one car with all the Vintage Air controls on one side on a nice stainless panel. I'll probably do that.. Would still be interested to see what you've done though. We've got a few more months of colder weather before doing the AC swap. Just ordered a spare dash-top structure on Ebay that we're going to re-design to include the AC-vents and a pop-up Nav screen in a way that it all hides away like it's meant to be there.