So, I spent some more time with my minor today…
Having stripped the dashboard down I was able to complete fitting of the heater more easily, although I had to do hideous, hideous things to the ‘footwell’ setting on the passenger side to get it to fit with the new heater matrix, which saddens me, but hey, the whole thing will be going when she’s electrified, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.
It will, hopefully, be producing warmer air. I must remember to top-up the coolant system before starting her again.
I also got the new indicator stalk in, which turned out (surprise surprise) to be not quite as straightforward as you might like to imagine. The old one was actually held together with tape (well, the ball bearing which makes it ‘sit’ in left-off-right positions was held in place with tape). This is because the thing that holds the ball bearing in had disintegrated, and removing the ball bearing led to an indicator that flapped around like a wet fish. So the ‘temporary’ fix was to tape it in place, in such a way that it still sort of worked. I’d bought a new indicator lever with the intention of fixing it ages ago, but not got around to it because it required taking the dash apart. Today I had no such excuse, and after a brief tussle with the lucar connectors (lucas is not known as the prince of darkness without good cause) I had the new lever wired in, but hanging like an ornamental basket from the dash.
Attaching it was okay, except that in the position in which the self-cancelling mechanism would (should) work, the horn-connector brush thing wasn’t actually making contact. I spent some time comparing the new and the old and eventually came to the conclusion (unsurprisingly) that the new one is not quite the right shape. A bit of bending and success appeared to be mine. We’ll find out if success really is mine when I put the steering wheel back on.
The dash is all back together now, and she’s looking her shiny-ass self.
Then I put the glove box in. Then I took it out again, because I realised that I need it out to install the speakers. Doh.
So *then* I thought I’d make a start on fitting the scuttle panels with speakers. Because whilst I drove her for years with no speakers at all, I’d quite like a radio again. This, of course, requires something to attach the speakers to, so I finally forked out for the scuttle panels (although I’ve wanted them for a while). The speakers I got a while ago have been sat in the garage too.
And thus, I hoped, I would fairly rapidly be able to have audio from the radio. Only no.
See, having spent some time carefully examining the speakers and the unutterably appalling installation instructions they came with I carefully cut one of the panels for one of them to fit. I also slightly modified the panel to include a bracket to hold it to the underside of the dash, because I quickly realised that the scuttle panel in my minor is not held in place by a parcel shelf (as my minor is devoid of parcel shelf).
Now I should have looked a leeetle more carefully at the appalling instructions because actually, in there is a hint that something is amiss. See, eventually you get to this point you can see above, and you realise that the screws provided *should* have gone through the grille to hold the grille and the speaker onto the mount. The only teensy tiny little problem is that the only screws provided are tiny:
Indeed, in the box’s manifest (if I can abuse that word that way) it actually shows that the speaker comes with four dinky little machine screws, and four dinky little self tappers. Then in the diagram for attaching the grille it has ‘insert four nice long screws though the grille, speaker and into the speaker mount’ as one of the images. What now?! Argh.
So I paused, reconsidered, and decided that hopefully tomorrow when we go shopping I can nip up to Bishopston Hardware and they can furnish me with an array of small machine screws so I can fit the bastard things.
Right. So. JBL, not top of my christmas list at the moment.
It being apparent that I wouldn’t be fitting the speakers today, I abandoned that job, and headed on for the next stop on our list of upgrades, the second of the heated seats. Both seats were out of the car (thanks Nikki), and I’d ‘done’ one of them yesterday (I’m not very happy with the vinyl on it, but hey).
Turning over the driver’s seat demonstrated the somewhat atrophied nature of the webbing, and the bodges made over the years to keep the seat usable:
Not only were the backrest ones completely inelastic, some of them had snapped completely. New webbing for the backrest was easy peasy:
Installing the rubber mat for the base wasn’t too traumatic, although this one had a moulding fault. I considered sending it back, but the amount of hassle is probably more than the mat’s worth, so I’ve just supported that bit of the mat with a webbing strap. I think I forgot to show the mat in place yesterday; this is the passenger seat (from yesterday) with the new mat and webbing:
The new seat foam and heated seat panel were dropped in…
Although I realise now that the pointfullness of replacing the seat foam with non-flammable modern foam is somewhat reduced by having the 1960’s vinyl cover which contains…standard foam. And the back of the seat which appears to be made of horsehair and glue:
I have no idea what it’s actually made of (I’ve just checked, it is indeed horsehair and glue). I’m not quite sure what the flammability rating of ‘horsehair and glue’ is, but I am slightly concerned by it. Thankfully, I can connect the base and the back of the heater independently, so we’ll see how I’m feeling about that later.
Anyhow, I started on the fun *fun* fun job of trying to get it all nice and snug again, this time I’ve taken pictures on disassembly, so I might do a better job of getting it to look nice when I reassemble it (the driver’s seat just looks a bit flappy, although I think that might just be stretching from the many years of being over stuffed to make up for failing old webbing). But I’ve stopped now for the evening…
It’s quite exciting though, she’s coming together. Oh, and I also installed the missing sucker that goes stops the rear-view mirror from ramming a piece of metal against the window. Just because. Other jobs I might do, replacing the indicator relay with an electronic one, in preparation for fitting LED bulbs for the indicators. I’ve got the bulbs, but I’m slightly inclined to wait until a bulb fails. Either that or pull them and carry them as spares in the Volvo. TBH, they don’t exactly blow that often.
Anyhow, all of this leads us closer to her being back on the road, which after my little jaunt in up the (private) road at the back of the house yesterday is quite a pleasing feeling.
