Dash vent swap

Today Mario came over with his new Focus ST and we got to work on a little project. My SE has silver trim in the interior, but the outer vents on the dash are all black. In contrast, Mario’s ST has a blacked-out interior but the same vents have silver accents. As it turns out we both wanted the opposite to what we already had, so we agreed to swap.

My SE’s original vents:

No one had done this before so we had to figure it out for ourselves. It didn’t take too long. Rather than post the full how-to here, I’ll provide a link at the bottom of the post.

The vents were held in place with clips and one torx screw. They were stubborn but eventually let go.

Since the Focuses are different model years (mine being a ’12 and his a ’13) we also had to swap the headlight switches. 2013s receive a trunk-release button that ’12s don’t have. With the parts swapped, here’s a comparison. On the left is the piece that went into my sedan.