72 TA : New Project

[Mr70]

Real nice..and it matches your 8tk Demo tape.

[njsteve]

Spent about 10 hours on the car today. Perfect day for installing a headliner - about 85 and humid.

I bought the new headliner about a year ago and of course they come in a box all folded up. After pinning it to the wall and letting it hang for about a month so the folds would come out, I then used the wife's steam iron and got the rest of the major fold marks out of it. After it was nice and flat, I rolled it around a 5" diameter, five foot long piece of PVC pipe and wrapped the whole thing in a couple blankets and stored it inside. It worked great - a year later and no wrinkles when I unrolled it.

Here's the finished product in the car:

[njsteve]

While waiting for the headliner to stretch I pulled out the dash and vacuumed out the body shop dust out of everything. There was a ton of dust and crud in the lower footwells and inside the dash ductwork. Glad I got all the garbage out now instead of the first time I turned on the A/C.

The second gen Firebirds use a giant one piece dash. It's not a dash pad, per se, it's an entire housing for everything. That is why these things are so hard to find and so damn expensive when you locate one. They don't age well and most of them have the radio mounting area gouged out. Mine has been "trimmed" by a previous owner but the factory AM/FM face plate holds the front of the radio in fine. Other than that, the pad is mint.



Here's the pad during the hose down:

[njsteve]

Here's the pad after cleaning and spraying with a light coat of SEM Landau Black. That stuff works great. I also misted the plastic interior panels and kick panels. Can't say enough about that SEM stuff, it works great covers quick and dries instantly. And it looks exactly like the original black vinyl.

Sure glad I've kept that 17 year old Viper all these years...makes the best workbench ever!

[njsteve]

Taking a few days off to work on the car...
Got the dash back in and all the gauges, ventilation and stuff installed. Everything actually works including that damn annoying key in the ignition buzzer!

Of course now there's more stuff I'm missing - the two ducts that go under the steering column and behind the console. These connect the main heater/ac box to the driver's side of the dash. I actually forgot that I needed to hunt those parts down after all these years. I guess its ebay time.





I'm keeping the crappy steering wheel in there until the car is finally back home for good. Don't want to risk damaging it when it goes back to the body shop.

[njsteve]

Got more of the interior done and the back seats installed. The console and front seats go in next.

[njsteve]

Here's the 2 ducts I need to find now, just in case anyone has these in a pile in their garage. (I have a duct pile but I seem to have extras for everything but these two).

1) The center-to-steering column duct:



2) and the steering column-to-drivers vent tube duct:

[gb70]

awesome!