Sunday, 9 May 2010

DHC report nr. 88; Fitting dashboard

After I finished the trim around the hood stowage area, I continued with fitting the hood pivot cover and the floor carpets. Although not very difficult it was rather time consuming, especially marking and cutting the various holes for mounting points, cable passages or steering column.



Visible in the last picture is a very useful piece of kit to locate screw holes behind a carpet, a pop-rivet. Also clear with flash photography is the amount of dust on the trim parts. Luckily it wipes of very easily with a damp cloth.


With the carpets sorted I went over the wiring in preparation for the fitting of the dashboard to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything (which I had ...) and fitted some extra interior lights in some strategic places like footwells and glove/fuse box. These will be switched through a normal but hidden switch. Gave me some headaches to work out how best to supply them with power (I wanted them to work without the ignition being switched on) but got that sorted by using a direct supply from the battery. Handy as I need power directly from the battery for the radio! But in the end I got everything sorted in preparation for the fitting of the dashboard.

And after a short tea break I started on the dashboard itself, although I nearly managed to damage the cars paint work very seriously first. While walking to the car wit the dash’ in hand I nearly lost my balance. This resulted in the dashboard hitting the side of the right-hand rear wing leaving me with a very nasty looking black mark on the paint. Turned out to be excess coating from the dashboard which luckily could be polished of quite easily, phew!
The actual fitting of the dashboard was a bit of an anti climax as it went in fairly easy. I think it only took me about half an hour to put it in place, get it aligned properly and put in all the screws. Looks lovely in “all black”.




Next on the "jobs-to-do-today-list" were the steering column switches and the switches’ nacelle. This one really put up a fight. Took me an hour and a half to get it in place. Whatever I tried the two halves just didn’t want to fit together properly. There was just to much tension on them. In the end I had to undo the steering column bolts and dashboard’s screws alongside the column to get the tension of. Which did the trick in the end, the nacelle slipped in without a problem and even the slim long bolts slipped into place as they should.


And to finish another day of spannering I fitted the mud flaps. As their mounting holes were drilled and fitted with threaded inserts before the car went away for coating this was a rather straightforward job. Only need to fabricate two small brackets for the inside mounting points of the rear mud flaps. And hopefully I find some decent stuff to make some new ones, as the ones I have on the car now have seen better days.


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