Interior Stripdown

01 May 2015

So, car in the garage, time to get going. I thought I'd start from the top; taking off the windscreen, then removing the interior, before moving on to the engine bay and then the suspension. I'm not going to go into the same excruciating detail as for the Dax build because there are plenty of step-by-step guides to the 'B. But I'll highlight anything interesting/difficult along the way.

The screen is bolted in by two bolts either side, behind the dash. Apparently you can reach these without removing the dash, but since it's all comming off anyway, I did it the easy way. So the dash came out first; not too hard after removing the centre console, as long as you know about the hidden bolts behind the centre air vents. These have clips inside which are depressed, and then the vents slide out the front.

From there it's mostly just fiddly - taking out the speedo cable and oil pressure capilliary line, disconnecting the cables (the whole dashboard harness can be disconnected from the rest of the car via a few connectors). Nothing too hard. Interesting to see that the glove box is actually made of cardboard. Thick cardboard, to be sure, but cardboard nonetheless. Quality stuff!

        

I then stripped the dash, removing all of the gauges as they are all rather tatty and I'll probably replace them. Well, I'll probably replace the lot actually but anway.

The screen was then simple to remove, as said just a couple of bolts each side and out it comes.

It was then obvious why I'd had such terrible trouble with a leak on the driver's side, which I'd finally fixed with vast amounts of silicone sealant. There's an infill strip between the wing and the main body, and the rear section of it is missing on the driver's side, leaving a nice big gap:

      Left - part of sealing strip missing on driver's side. Right - passenger side showing the strip in place, at a different angle just to confuse the reader!

Then it was out with the hood, seats, and carpets, and a good look at the bodywork underneath. The good news, it's mostly in very good condition. The cavities have all been sprayed with a sealer(waxoyl I presume) at some point, the underneath has all been sprayed with underseal and it all looks very sound. The only bad bits I've found so far are in the footwells. A small rust hole in the passenger side, the driver's is a bit worse. A small hole hidden under big blobs of filler of some kind which is a bit nasty:

Then...oh dear, this one is in the sill isn't it?

     

Hmmmm. Not ideal, though far from the end of the world. At some point I'll need to grind it all back to metal here and see what's up. Hopefully it's all small enough that I can just weld in some smallish repair plates. But that comes later, I'll carry on stripping it all down first.