A Million Small Things

Now that the car was finally in my own garage, it was time to put it back together and register it. But there was a lot to do before getting to that. Things on my list included:

• Building brackets for the electrical fan
• Adding the fan temperature sensor
• Adding expansion tank for the radiator
• Adding the valance panel and front spoiler
• Rebuilding the interior
• Adding weatherstrips to the doors
• Adding gasgets to the exhaust
• Adding heat shield for the starter
• Build a horn button (original button from the steering wheel was missing)
• Fix a small oil leak from the driver side valve cover
• Align the headlamps correctly
• Align the rear wheels (because of the risers in the spring)

That's a lot of big and small jobs. I started from the interior. When driving home, I had placed some of the panels in the car but now had to take them out again. It seemed that the interior must be assembled in the correct order so I removed pretty much everything. The carpets also smelled a bit musty so I also took them out and washed them with some water and soap. Unfortunately they had some stains that didn't come off but luckily the stains would be covered by the seats.

The drive home had been quite noisy and hot. I hoped that the volume would drop with the weatherstrips and interior but the heat needed more addressing. So I bought some noiseproofing/heat insulating panels. They had glue on one side so I just cut them to correct size and attached to the firewall and floors. Then I put the carpets back and bolted the seats in.

With that out of the way, I placed the air ducts below the dash. Simple job of screwing a few screws and positioning the wiring harnesses better. Lucky that because I had to do it again when I realised that the air vent vacuum hoses were installed in the wrong places...

There is a huge mess of small vacuum hoses inside the dash. Luckily I found a good diagram of them from Willcox Corvette. I checked the hoses and, if I remember correctly, they were all wrong... So out came the ducts. Correcting the hoses was quite fiddly as some of the vents were in really tight places but I managed with only slightly bleeding knuckles. Assembling the interior would be much easier if I had taken it apart myself...