Dateline - 03/20/2016 - Saturday was consumed with my first bike ride of 2016, so I put time in on Sunday instead. This weekend was dedicated to the dash. Before I could do anything, I needed to take care of some wiring issues that I still had outstanding. I needed to wire in the distributor power as well as the power to the new electrical cooling fans. I needed power that was coming from the ignition side so I wired it into fuse #1 which is hot with ignition.
After getting that sorted, I needed to install some of the vacuum hoses for the heater/air controls. This of course was harder then it should have been, but with persistence and a few broken knuckles I got that done.
Next was installing the center gauges in the dash and hooking them up. Here they are installed without wiring:
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| Center gauges installed |
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| Center gauges installed (back) |
Then I hooked them up and tried to get them into the dash and realized I do not have enough room! Yikes! I'm going to need to do something different. Before going hog wild on re-wiring, I decided to make sure I really understand how the dash is going to fit together, so I started putting in the passenger side of the dash. This required that I install the pressed board glove box. I needed to modify this somewhat to give room for the new wiring to the fuse blocks, but fortunately I din't need to do a lot and was able to retain most of the glovebox space.
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| Original glovebox with slight modification to fit new wiring. |
I also installed the glovebox door and air vent. Then I "fitted" the unit in the car. Of course, it didn't fit correctly, which required that I pull some of the vinyl back and file down some of the fiberglass underneath. Fiddly work, but better to have things fit! With the dash fitted, I can see that I have a couple of brackets to make, but not a big deal at all.
To fix the center gauge issue, I'm going to need to pre-wire them using the nut/screw connectors provided on the gauges instead of the bayonet type that I originally planned to use. The plan is to wire in all the gauges, leaving pigtails that I will be able to plug/unplug on the left hand side. This will allow me to install and remove the dash panel much easier. Should have thought of this before! All things you learn with a prototype!
Next week I want to install the drivers side panel to make sure I really understand how all of this fits together. Once I know that everything is going to fit, I'll start installing braces and screwing things in. Here are pictures of the dash thus far:
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| Dash from passenger front door without flash |
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| Dash from passenger front door with flash |
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| Dash back window without flash |
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| Dash back window with flash |
