Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 17:52:00 -0400
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject: Re: FW: Dash removal - how long
In-Reply-To: <BAY113-W4414E7D9E4A5A991FE96A9CE5F0@phx.gbl>
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At 04:52 PM 10/23/2010 -0400, B Feddish wrote:
>Thanks for everyones suggestions. So I've got estimates from 3
>hours to 2 years. :) That narrow it down. hahahaha OK,, I'm too
>tired from doing leaf cleanup for the last 8 hours so I'm not going
>to start it tonight. I'll review Ben's page I have saved somewhere
>and think about maybe starting tomorrow. It's
Bryan, if you look back Joel Cort and I among others have written in
some detail about this. You'll also, if you look hard enough, find
one of our well known members (?possibly Mark Drillock?) say that
he'd just had a dashboard out and back in a completely ridiculous
time -- half an hour maybe? I forget.
A few points:
You can drive the beast perfectly* well without a dashboard, just
hook up the steering column again (make sure the rubber coupling for
the collapsing column is fitted correctly). So you don't have to
panic if there's a sticking point. This will let you give the heater
box the loving attention it surely needs.
* for some value of "perfectly." No gauges, of course.
You don't have to drill out the antitheft screws holding the column
up. Good Vise Grips work just fine. And you don't have to pay VW
$10 apiece for replacements, just use normal M8 bolts. The thieves
no doubt have Vise Grips.
You need space alongside for the width of the dash as it comes out.
The large screws on top of the dash hold the wipers on. The small
sheet-metal ones that you care about require a screwdriver that can
pass through glass -- I'm sure the dash went in before the
windshield. Since you can't line up the screwdriver, the heads try
extra hard to mangle themselves. OTOH once you've Dremel'ed the head
off the one you just mangled, the rest unscrews easily from
below. For replacement I shifted to hex-head screws.
It isn't coming out until you've removed those two defroster vents on top.
The heater box mounting screws are M6 with P3 head, and the other end
of them is exposed to weather. PB Blaster and a hand impact tool are
your friends -- a regular driver will try awfully hard to cam out and
wreck the screw. I replaced them with hex/washer.
There's a ton of stuff in the wayback about restoring heater
boxes. For some reason hardly any attention is given to the two
delicate pressure flaps that allow ram air to bypass the blower. The
mounting clips and pins grind each other from round with a medium gap
at the bottom to triangular with a large gap at the bottom, at which
point they stick. Ram air still works, but blower doesn't. I've
made the point elsewhere about how hard they are to get to and fix --
looking at it now I'm wondering if there was a reason I didn't simply
make a hole alongside to work through and cover it up after. I
expect I'll find out soon when my present one comes out.
Remember the clevis on the clutch pedal that needs grease if it
hasn't already worn out.
Yours,
David
