Here we go. No going back now.
It starts right away. The black thing on its side is the center gauge cluster housing. This has been suspect for some time but when I took it out it cracked in half. The housing was an unexpected $450. More on that later dammit.
Spaghetti
This was another turning point. I didn’t expect to restore the entire dash. It was clear at this point the top dash pad, center console, both A-arms, and passenger dash pad come out. Speakers and kick panels too. You can’t just take them out and put them back in without touching up the paint on them. Half the mounting screws were correct. All of the mounting brackets were rusted, old, and bent to shit. All needed to be replaced. Paint and screws – $100.
I can see clearly now the dash is gone. Now that we’re here, I see many more unexpected hours of effort. I can’t just leave the speakers like that. Check out that metal rectangle doohickey in the center of the picture. That’s the mounting bracket for the heater and vent controls. It’s connected to four different drive-by-wire connections for the vents. Not easy to disassemble. All of that needs to be taken out and cleaned up. The giant black box in the top right, with the yellow and blue wires over it? That’s the heater box and that all comes out. Everything in that picture needs to come out. Lots more effort added.
Ah shit. There’s more rust than I like to see around that windshield. That ended up taking me about 3 hours of sanding, prepping/rust proofing, and painting to get back to acceptable.
Another gotcha is that this wiring harness feeds all the way to the center console. Lots of individual connections in there, it’s going to be tough going back together. The pictures below show all these cables. Also check it out, the heater box is gone!
Dash is out. Dash wiring harness is out. Driver and Passenger dash pads out, center console out. Speakers, heater brackets and wires, heater box. It’s all out. No mo dash. The leftovers are the vacuum lines and the steering column. There’s no way I need to replace that, right?
