The past week's interior work has focused on the dash area.
The gauge faces are in great shape, as are the chrome rings,
so I wanted to just clean up the connections on the back, along
with those on the switches. So, off to a local electrical shop
for some contact cleaner, and some of that spray one puts on
the connections to keep conductivity good. The spray cleaned
up the contacts OK, but blew crud into the gauges, against the
glass. :(. So, apart came the gauges; a micro-sized jeweler’s
screwdriver eased the tangs of the chrome rims enough to enable
rotating them enough to align with the openings in the cases.
BTW, on my gauges at least, the insides are pale blue. I don't
know if that's original or not, as I found a label on one gauge
from a rebuild service.
The switches cleaned up nice. did you know they were supposed to
make a "click" sound when operated? Some metal polish did up the
chrome well, the contact cleaner took care of the innards w/out
disassembling them, and the black plastic responded nicely to
buffing w/a Scotchbrite pad, followed by a coat of clear toy-car
paint. The DPO's cheapo re-do of the dash was unprinted, as Alpine-style
tags on the switches were used. The new dash is printed for all of the
switches except "blower"; is this normal?
The idiot light bezels are fine except the red one, which has faded
to white. I cannot find my _old_ bottle of bulb dye, bought when I
wanted my Datsun 510 to have red lights inside like a BMW. Also, a
quick check of leftover bits from my Alpine 5 revealed the red bezel
was faded on that car too. Any suggestions?
While the dash is out, I pulled out as much cr*p as possible, heater-
blowers, brackets and stuff, and put on a coat of black Rustoleum
Industrial Coating to all surfaces back there; fortunately, it's in
pretty good shape, just grungy and covered in old jute sound-deadening.
While I was pulling the wiper motor (filthy), I recalled that the trim
bezels for the wipers and washers, up on the cowl, are mediocre looking.
Are these available anywhere? Shortly I'll be able to install the rest
of the Dynamat, and resume the installation of the interior itself.
BTW, Motorsport magazine had an article on Brooklands w/a picture(small) of
the original Tiger and Tigress, back in the 20's
Larry Wright "I can't get no-- Satis-traction"
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