Happy New Year to all readers. Christmas brought a number of things, the usual hangover and disappointing TV viewing, but on the plus side the trimmer completed the leather work for the seats, dash and door cards. I also completed (almost) the carpets. So here's how it looks now
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| Carpets Completed |
With the door cards back from the trimmer I have fitted these as well. The only minor issue is that it's fiddly to put the clips back into the card with the trim glued down, I should have left these in before they went to the trimmer. But once fixed I'm pleased with the result.
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| Door card |
Finally the dashboard, this is how it looked on return from the trimmer, again I'm very pleased with the overall result.And, not wanting to sound fetishist, the smell of leather in garage is great.
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| Leather Trimmed Dashboard |
The next job is to fit the instruments, I had pre-cut the holes in fibreglass and just had to cut the leather. The factory recommends a 2 mm oversize on the diameter of the holes to allow for the leather. 2mm worked fine for the large gauges but was a little loose on the smaller ones and too much on the warning lights, if I did again I'd add 0.5mm around the warning lights to make for a tighter fit, I have managed to fix these with a large washer and 10mm hose clamp behind each one.
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| Dials Fitted |
Next job is the wiring. I got permission from "The MRS" after Christmas to use the dining room table, it means I can site down and do the work in the warm which was a big improvement on the doing the carpets in the cold of November. The wring is not simple for a novice like me, a big help was having a decent terminal crimping tool. I laid out the loom bundling together the various groups of wires; switches, small gauges, large gauges & warning lights. The factory recommend using a daisy chain method to link the earths and common feeds such as the instrument lighting, however for various reasons I didn't opt for this. instead I used a couple of distribution bars fixed on the inside of the dash. I have the Smiths Classic gauges and some of these need to have a regulated supply and the factory does supply a regulator with the kit. The rest of the wiring was a matter of working through each switch / instrument in turn and ticking them off. Here's where I am today, this is ready for testing now, it's not complete as I've yet to add the immobiliser but I want to iron out any problems before I introduce more complexity and that's why there's a couple of stray leads.
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| Wiring so far (no immobiliser) |
