Addition by Subtraction, Part 2
The Missus has fallen ill with a nasty cold, so nasty that she’s actually staying home from work today to sleep/recover. This meant that she was in bed around 8:00 or so last night, allowing me to work on New Blue (we need a better name for this car — Blue 2? It does have Electric Boogaloo as the paint job) without pangs of guilt. I also finished the last half of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on DVD whle working on the car. Alec Guiness is masterful as George Smiley. More car details after the jump:
Two things were on my agenda last night: remove the headlights (which we don’t need) and remove the remainder of the dash panel. I started with the headlights, which weren’t very difficult to remove. Just four 10mm bolts held each of them in, along with the actuator motors that made them do the flippy thing. The driver’s side light and cage was pretty sloppily repaired from some crash damage and didn’t want to fully emerge from its hiding place. I applied the Tim Allen Theory (more power) and got the job done. The passenger side was easier to remove. Without the sealed headlight itself, just the enclosure and motor on each of them weighed just over 7 pounds each. So that task alone added 14+ pounds of lightness!
Next it was onto the removal of the remainder of the dash. This probably could have stayed, but it was holding in a few remnants of the heater removal project (mainly the defroster baffle), and frankly the dissymetry of no dash on the passenger side of the instrument cluster versus the dash on the driver’s side of the instrument cluster was disturbing visually. And I think the extra weight would have made the car pull to the left under racing conditions.
So, out with the instrument cluster first, then the plastic surround, then the remaining dash panel and heater remnants. Then I re-installed the instrument cluster, making sure to re-attach everything (the speedo didn’t work when I test drove it, but the tach did — how does that make sense? I think that the other gauges were working but who knows), and the dash surround. Much better. And because the dash panel was steel covered in vinyl and plastic, a couple more pounds of lightness added. Unfortunately, during the operation, a ratchet handle slipped from my hand and spiderwebbed the windshield. We’ll have to decide if we can live with it, or if we want to remove the windshield entirely or if we want to swap in the one from the parts car. There, I’ve confessed my goof.
I suspect that there is still some additional stripping that we can do down the road. There is a lot of wiring in the front half of the car that has to do with creature comfort electronics (heat/AC, radio) that is totally superfluous at this point, since the devices that the wires are to control are now disembodied from the car. But I don’t want to play around with removing electrical wiring until we have the car re-wired for the battery/alternator disconnect switch and can make sure that the removal of that extra wiring doesn’t cause any problems. I know that wires aren’t magical, but I don’t want to cause any unnecessary electrical problems, either.
I rented Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy just last week but wound up with disc three. Very upsetting.
You might want to stay away from ratchet handles for a while.
I did that too the first time when borrowing them from the library. I’d be glad to lend them to you before they go back to the Dallas Public Library. I’ve got something like 96 renewals left on them. It’s 6 hours long, though, so be warned. Sort of slowly paced, too, but intriguing.
I like slowly paced. That’s why I’m a race car driver.
(note to self: reconsider Brad’s participation in this project after he’s submitted the LeMons application)