[SpookyZalost]

ok so update, I've been going over more designs as I look into incorporating more stuff and one big thing stands out, there's space in the spot where the Din space is but I've been thinking, given there's a decent amount of mounting brackets why don't I just do some woodwork and make a brand new panel with the spaces for the stuff I want to add and transplant the climate control from the plastic shell to the wood one?
there's literally no reason I can't since it's one unit.

and that way I can mount the radio, the switches (which will include an audio switch btw, more on that later), the CB which will feed to the car's speakers via the audio switch, and possibly a transplanted cassette player?

just something I've been thinking about, plus if it's made of wood I can give it a nice finish.



the way I see it that bottom section is a pocket I can put in, the space is there it's just not utilized efficiently because of conforming to the car's interior and whatnot, it's already got a pocket, double din sized even that I don't use and 3 spots including the current pocket space that I can use to mount the frame to.

so that's 1 single din slot, 2 special slots sized for a cassette deck and a CB radio, a pocket, and a spot sized to hold the climate control module, also a row of switches somewhere to toggle the various audio outputs to the car's speakers, that's the easy part, the hard part is rigging everything to power without draining from the battery, to that end I'll likely be rigging up a power switch next to each module so I can toggle it off directly.

-------------------------------------------------------  Edit 05/07/18

so... a couple things I've learned, the easiest way to hook all this up would be through the front Aux in port on my radio.
still need to power it all, and I'm going to need a Line level converter for the cassette player which will covert it's output to RCA but once I do that and convert RCA to 3.5mm headphone then it should be relatively simple to install a 3.5mm audio switch between the CB + cassette and the aux in on the radio.

switch radio to aux mode, flip power switch on cassette and or CB and select the audio input you want to use, the tricky part is making sure not to blow fuses/overvolt things but if I rig up an on/off on the power feed then as long as I'm not turning everything on at once it should be fine... I'm really starting to get hopeful I can pull this off!