MKIII #5369 "Refresh" Thread - A bat spit shine!

[David Hodgkins]

I spoke with Speedhut gauges on Friday. They ran into a problem. My original gauge had a built in fuel level on the LED screen and for some weird reason they can't put the GPS AND fuel level in at the same time. They have another gauge that has two sweep arms - one for speed, one for fuel - but it's not a reverse speedo(!) I decided that the GPS and fuel level are MUST HAVE'S so I bit the bullet and ordered the non-reverse speedo. It looks like this one:



It won't ship until Monday. I paid for overnight shipping, but that's just another in a too-long line of "stuff" to do...

[David Hodgkins]

continued...

This piece came out extremely clean and even. As a matter of fact, this piece and the cubby wall that follows were both "perfect", in that each section turned only used a single abrasion disk each, and I really dialed in the consistency, producing nice, even swirls. These pieces are clearly the best I've done so far:





I polished the trunk and coated it with sharkhide, and then mounted the cubby wall:











continued...

[David Hodgkins]

After that I covered the f-panels and front splash guards with sharkhide and coated the backs with rubberized bedliner spray:





I also covered the firewall with sharkhide:



...and mounted it. I originally mounted this thing with 1/8" rivets, so I drilled the holes out to a proper 3/16" before mounting it the final time. As you can see in this shot, I also wrapped the now-single wire loom. So much cleaner now!:



I also hand-polished the passenger footbox and coated it with sharkhide as well:



...and mounted the wiper motor, after cleaning up and sharkhiding the mount:



When I was putting the car together originally, I nicked one of the harness wires and then used a clamp-on connector to repair the wire. It pulled apart during deconstruction so I used my handy little tool to free the plug connector and replaced the whole wire:

[David Hodgkins]

...then I was able to start mounting the dash. Here's the new speedo, with GPS and integrated fuel indicator sweep:



Frank Maslowski came over on thursday and helped me out by mounting the f-panels and splash guards. As you can tell from this shot, there were still some electrical connections to tend to:



...and this is the last (blurry) shot before HB. Close, but not good enough:



continued...

[pavieSD]

Dave keep at it! It's going to look fantastic once you freshen up all the little things. Plus you'll be able to advertise this as a well sorted, twice reviewed sort of build, so should have lots and lots of trouble free miles for the next guy. On that front, I unfortunately wasn't able to make it up this year, as my battery and starter both crapped out. I'm waiting on parts to get delivered this week, so hopefully my car will be back on the road this weekend. Cheers.

Mark