glenncal1, do you have the regular, boxy looking two lever Mercruiser one or the "zero effort" four lever one? We already had the "zero effort" one so I thought it'll be really easy to swap, but the mounting hole was too small for the Livorsi ones, so we needed to cut the fiberglass a bit more. One of our mechanics did the throttle exchange and it does take some time as both the old and new levers need to be disassembled and then reassembled. The cables should work fine, so no need to change them unless their bad to begin with. If you already have the "zero effort" controls and the only problem is the paint peeling, you can always take them a part and have them powder coated to look like new. We've done that several times.

snowrunner, not sure exactly what you mean, but if you use the old panels as templates for the new ones, the new ones should fit like factory if the panel maker knows their job. We flush mounted a Garmin 720 on the GPS place and used the original panel as a template, but just glued the Garmin template on the old panel so that the new one came with the Garmin cut out. Without old panels, you'd need to make your own template out of card board or similar and take that template to the panel fabricator.

To clarify, was wondering if the newer style panels on the 2002+ fit the older dash opening. Looks to be the same, but with the addition of the trim buttons.