This month’s big job was carpets. I drove the car down to Kohl Road and Custom, just a couple of kilometres from me, to get a new custom carpet made. I’d done some testing to make sure things were working as much as possible. Steering, brakes, seatbelt on the driver’s seat, and I got my wife to drive down behind me just in case of any incidents. Everything was fine except for one problem – the slip ring I modified on the steering wheel isn’t right, and every time I steered the car, the horn beeped! So all the way down there I was randomly beeping at everyone. Embarrassing!
I stopped and put 20l of fuel in there as it was running on fumes by this point. Then it was a short (still beeping) run around the corner to drop off the car.
Three days later I got a call from Carol at Kohl to say it was all done. These guys don’t muck around!
And look at the job they did, it looks amazing.
They covered the sides of the centre console too to match.
I bought a set of mats a few months ago, and I finally got to fit them. The pins that hold them in were rusty, so I cleaned them up and painted them.
The new window regulator arrived from the UK. Here it is next to the original one. The new one is on the left. Quite a different layout but it fitted in fine.
When I slotted the window into place I found a problem – the holes in the moving bracket for the window were nowhere near where they needed to be. Several hours later and after fitting and removing the whole thing several times I finally got it fitted, and the window closed. It’s really stiff going up so needs some more adjustment or lubrication or something. More investigation needed, but at least I can close the window now.
At this point I was starting to run out of things to do to avoid tackling that wiring. I re-fitted the rear side panels.
Then I caved and fitted the centre console.
Pulled the appropriate wires through.
And fastened everything in place.
One of the challenges was working out which pipe went where on the diff lock switch. With some Googling and trial and error I think I got it right but the diff locks aren’t behaving as they should, so there’s work to do there.
To test out the diff locks I had to have the engine running as they’re vacuum operated, which would have been a bit silly to do in the garage, so out Rusty came into the sun for a while.
Even with the mucky paint it looks so awesome. I’m holding out until Finer Details NZ can work their magic on it.
Follow the full Project Rusty build here.
