I removed a bunch of little stuff from inside the car today.
Map light and switch.
Rear speaker switch
Part of the lower dash plastic trim (driver side)
Radio (except for some of the wires
)
Hood release cable
E-brake pedal assembly
Except for the plastic trim, none of this stuff will be going back on the car. It's too heavy and there are better and
WAAAY lighter options nowadays.
The E-brake is getting replaced by a Neon hand brake mounted in the console (shhh, don't tell Tam...:toot
. I broke the wire off the E-brake idiot light switch so I taped it off and lableled it.
I don't need the hood release cable because it's missing the handle and I already put an external latch release on the hood anyway. I have a set of locking hood pins I'll be using to make sure everything stays put under the hood.
The plastic trim is going to be my color test panel to see what shade of grey I want to use for the dash.
The rear speaker switch only took a minute to get it out. The plug right behind it made it a lot easier to remove as well.
The map light however wasn't as simple. It came off the dash easy enough but then the wires went straight into the harness. So, I just left a few inches of the wire on the harness and cut the wires. Yup, I taped and labeled them too. The switch was seized solid so I squirted a little bit of WD-40 on it to see if that would help. After a while It finally started to move, stiffly. A few more times and it started to finally loosen up and I thought it was going to be savable. However, Rusty must have sent Murphy on vacation to south Texas cause he showed up and decided to lend me a hand. "SNAP!" The backing plate of the switch snapped in half. DOH!!!:doh:
The radio was fairly easy to get loose, however, it is currently being hung up by some wires that travel up and dissappear behind the guage cluster. I'll have to pull the guages out to be able to see where (or if) I can unplug the radio from the main harness. If it goes straight into the harness I'll just have to do the tape and label trick.
All this taping and labeling will make it easier on me when I go to start the rewiring job down the road.
Most of these parts will be sold off to help fund the project so I may as well just get them out of the way now. Some of them I cleaned up using my sandblast cabinet using low air pressure. I was able to clean up the plastic hood release cable bracket without even removing the ink stamped part number on the bottom. The outer collar and locknut for the rear speaker cleaned up real nice as well.
I also had made some corse threaded 5/16" x 3" long stainless steel studs so I could finally mount the Go-Wing to the trunk lid. The threaded mounting holes in the bottom of the pedestals were kinda fookerd up a bit so I drilled em out and tapped them to the next larger size. Hmmm, I didn't get pics of the installed wing dhamik... I have to remember to get them next time I'm at the garage.