I've been thinking about writing about our experience spending 12 days on the road going to spring fling and MATS. I can say that it was fun and extremely frustrating too. We got back on Monday and I have not even wanted to look at the car since.
anyway - here is the first installment of the saga
I went to spring fling last year in LA and had a good time. There were things I wanted to get done on the car prior to the show that did not happen. So this year I started getting ready about 5 weeks before the show. It's amazing how quickly those weeks went by with what only seemed to be slow progress. A few things on the list to do were to swap out the dash pad, add in the vintage air system I picked up last year and add in a bigger radiator. Some other things I wanted to do was put an in tank fuel pump to feed the main pump, fix the headliner, make a center console and a bunch of other little stuff. After talking to just dashes and finding out that the lead time for them is about 11 weeks, I had to decide if I wanted to go another year without a dash pad or use one of the plastic backed ones. I ended up using a pad from classic industries. I had previously gathered all the parts to make a 3 speaker, A/C dash pad so I had everything on-hand once the pad arrived. The pad showed up pretty quick and I got to work pulling the dash out of the car (I did the whole thing as one piece). I should have known that the pad wasn't going to fit like the OE one but that didn't phase me. There was a lot of cutting and fitting of the pad before it would go onto my dash frame and more cutting and fitting for the A/C vents would install in their places. All in all, it probably took about 15 hours of work to get the pad to the point where I could bolt it to the dash frame and have it fit and also look acceptable. Maybe at some point I will get my OE one sent to just dashes, but I have no incentive to mess with that thing again right now. With the dash out of the car, I went through and added more dynamat and heat shield insulation to the firewall along with the underside of the air intake/wiper motor area. Since I had the dash out, I thought this would be a good time to install the vintage air heat/AC unit under the dash. The instructions that come with the kit are pretty good, but like everything else, there are modifications that need to be made. I guess I am pretty used to this by now, but it still is frustrating to spend a bunch of money on something, then find out you have to re engineer part of it to make it work in your car. So the instructions tell you to drill some holes in the firewall. I spent a bunch of time welding up all the holes in the firewall before I had the car painted so the last thing I wanted to do was drill some holes in there and have random fasteners sticking through. I ended up using some angle bracket material and drilling holes through the air plenum to hang the box from the inside of the car. I could get at the fasteners through the wiper grille area to seal them from water. With that done, I decided to clean up the wiring mess that has been under the dash for the last 3 years and tidy things up with a bigger ATO style fuse box. I had used a bunch of butt and crimp connectors to hook up all the circuits. Personally, I hate using crimp connectors as they always end up failing at some point, so I cut, rerouted, soldered and heat shrunk all the connections which made me feel much better.
