So I am now thinking about this.... frt bumper...

 

WOW... I guess No one here really does much Modifications like I posted...
I know ARTIE1 does... thats radical taking the van body off the frame
I have looked into that frt bumper... and with No luck my buddy
does not have that bumper anywhere in his junk yard...So I guess on my next day
off of work I will go pillage the surrounding junk yards... lol looking

 

Oh, I think it's cool. I just can't justify the cost. I want fog lights. Big time. But I'm gonna have to do it on the cheap. Good luck on the search.

 

I love the idea of a Sierra bumper, although it's very hard to find one in good condition. Here is one more pic. You can see there's a slight gap where the dip is, since the bumper didn't belong there in the first place. But it doesn't matter, it looks great anyway. I'm sure it will require custom bracketry work.

 

I got really curious the other day and found out that the instrument cluster from a pre-2009 GM Kodiak/Topkick medium duty truck (MDT) physically fits into the 2003-2007 Express vans, and it has the tachometer!

The 2008+ vans have the digital tach in the DIC so it doesn't apply to those vans.

I bought one from a scrap yard:


It fits like the original and looks factory because of the same gauge style.

The wiring was not straightforward, I had to shuffle the connector pins, and add 2 wires for the tachometer and speed sensor signal from the PCM. The reason for the speed wire is that Express dash gets speed sensor info from Class 2 serial data, but the MDT cluster seems to be an older design. And while it does use the serial bus for the 4 small gauges, it doesn't use all the data from it, and it uses a separate wire for both tach and speedo.

I made all the gauges work and that by itself was a cool sense of accomplishment, however various warning lights became a problem. It needed me to run a few more separate wires for simple things like parking lights, parking brake and high beams. I would have had to remove the extra LEDs that are present on that cluster but not used in the van. The biggest obstacle was in that to keep the Tow/Haul light I would have had to rig up a separate LED indicator with two relays, to convert momentary Tow/Haul switch pulse to constant output. The MDT cluster doesn't have the T/H light and it's on the serial data bus.

Also, the odometer would need to be adjusted.



In the end I reverted everything back. It wasn't a necessity, more like a curiosity call / proof of concept. My Torque app shows me the RPMs...

 

This is the front of my truck I will agree that its hard to find a good bumper
from these years of trucks.. hint hint... but yet even the one with the round
fog lights are even tuffer to find...
but look at the gap even on my truck there is a gap.. so I dont think its the fact
that its not suppose to be there its just how it is. IMO

I will be getting up under both of my trucks and taking some pics and
see if I can tell what the differences are in the brackets

 

That Dash ARTIE1 is the same as in my truck... I am surprised that you
went that length to try to get it to work...
I give you COOTOS... on that one Bro....

 

Teammuir1, no this is a Kodiak cluster. Look closer, this goes only up to 80mph. Pick-up/SUV clusters are also completely different physically.

 

OHHHHH I C it is different
mine look like these....
MY bad...

 

OBDII bluetooth SCAN....
I have tried and tried to get my Bluetooth OBDII scan to link up with Torque... and I tried
Torque lite under the advisement of STAN... to see if it would work... and it does link but there
is NO ECU info..... so I guess I have a bad scan tool.....maybe ARTIE1..... you might have a
recommendation for me to try.. to rule the scanner bad.... but I think I have a bad one.
or I am not doing something correctly...