[drewskiren]

Thanks for the compliments, the unit came out of my 2002, but all 99-06 are identical.
You are correct that I haven't fully explained everything, the cowl cover will expose about 3 inches of the intake. I am planning on gluing/seam sealering a black plastic panel to the bottom of the cowl grill - covering the first set of grilles - after painting. Some kind of flat black that won't show up too much. This will also fully hide all of the crummy looking butchery that I performed. Knowing I required this panel that would hide everything from view, I went ahead and slathered the whole area in seam sealer. I will seal the black plastic cover on 3 sides and leave the end towards the grilles open to let whatever water sits on my plastic panel drip off.
One trick I may not have mentioned was that I unbolted the sides of the the dash panel and pulled the dash/rotated it to let me get the unit up in there. Once it was in I needed to trim a little on the bottom edge of the dash (shown earlier) to be able to bolt the dash back. I also trimmed random little plastic nipples and tabs off of the outside of the ac unit. Useless little manufacturing protrusions that added a half inch to the depth of it.