Chris Hammond
Monday, August 24, 2009 12:59:55 AM
So we’ve barely been in the house three weeks and I already lost and found something! So in my last blog post I complained that I thought I left the fiberglass dashboard for the 240Z in St. Louis. Well I was wrong! Tonight while trying to get things moved around in the garage to make room for our two primary vehicles I was up on the loft moving things and came across the dashboard!
So all is well again in Project240z.com land, well, as well as it can be! I was going to drive the car around the block tonight, and park it in the third car garage, but I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen unless I wanted to take the wiring harness out of the old dash and hook up the wires. Right now the ignition wires aren’t going to anything, so that would make it kind of hard to start the car and drive it. Oh well, I moved it around a bit by hand and made room for one of our cars in the garage at least, the F350 will have to stay outside for a while longer.
Hopefully by the end of September I’ll either have a new quieter exhaust on the car, or all the paint completely stripped off, or maybe even both!
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Chris Hammond
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 12:56:52 AM
So tonight after work I got the 240Z off the trailer, both of which had been parked in the Garage since we moved to Colorado a few weeks ago. I had lined up a storage lot for the trailer and wanted to get it out of the garage. Well the 240Z wasn’t easy to start, took a good 5+ minutes of attempts before it finally started up. Later in the day I realized the MAP hose wasn’t hooked up to the Megasquirt, that would explain the difficulty in starting! whoops.
So I dropped the trailer off and came home to organize the garage a bit, moved the newly assembled shelves in place and started going through some of my boxes. After I got bored with the unpacking I decided it was a good time to put all the bulbs and fuses that I had purchased yesterday into the car. That was pretty quick and painless, but didn’t produce any fruit! I didn’t see any lights in the rear of the car at all. So what next?
I simply decided to pull the dashboard out! The whole thing, gone, removed, not going back in (likely not) along with the blower and heater core. Why might you ask? Why not. The car will hopefully be somewhat streetable, but I won’t be using most of the gauges on the car anyways. For a speedo I’ll have the G2X (GPS data logging), for RPM I’ll likely have the G2X, or even a Netbook running the Megasquirt software to show me all the appropriate date from the ECU. So why do I need the stock dash? I don’t! Though I did realize after I pulled the dash that I left the fiberlass dashboard in St. Louis, and didn’t bring it to CO. Luckily I’m going back to STL next week for work and will hopefully get it packed up and shipped back.
I’ll need to do some creative wiring, hooking up a switch for the headlights, a horn, turn signals, and even the ignition, but I think it will be cool to have all those as switchable items on a nice clean looking dashboard, not the big old clunky stock one.
Here’s a photo sans dash.
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