Escort Hell: May 28, 2000

There was no way around it: I had to tear the dash apart.

The firewall battery rack came back from the welder, and I hoped to write a cheery little ditty about how it fit like a glove and all my battery boxes were done and the car was on the verge of being finished.

Well, it's not quite that simple. The battery box didn't fit. Another design mistake on my part (given my hardware design record, I'm sure you're shocked). I took it back to the welder and he trimmed it down, but when I tried to put the box in I still had a problem. What was in the way? The connectors for the A/C condenser and heater core are sticking out of the firewall. This prevented me from being able to properly seat the battery box against the firewall.

Have you ever noticed that when you're working on a project, a big thing might turn out to be easy, but then there's a small thing. Something that has to be done, but doesn't make a real big contribution to the final product. This "small thing" winds up taking a disproportionate amount of time and effort.

Such is the case here. This battery box holds only two batteries. It's the smallest of all three boxes, but it's the most trouble.

What is so hard? I have to tear into the the dash board and remove the heater unit to fit the battery box properly. Of all the places on a car I least like to work on, it's under the dash board. Detroit crams a huge amount of wiring, electronics, and ducts under the dash board. It's a miserable place to work.

So this is the quest: to take apart the dash board. Once this is done the following goals can be accomplished:

• Remove Heater Unit
  • Remove A/C Condenser and plug holes
  • Remove Heater Core, Replace with Electric Heater Core, and plug holes
• Mount fire wall battery box (while Heater Unit is out)
• Run Lead from Brake Switch to Control Panel
• Cut and Splice A/C switch so that it turns on Heater Core
• Fix/Replace Tachometer
• Mount E-meter on Dash, Run Wires
• Drill a Hole in Firewall for E-meter and other wires

This is an unusual web page compared to the others. Typically, I do a job on the car, take some pictures then when everything's completed I make the web page. This time around, I decided to post the page before I'd finished. I hadn't posted a page in a few months, and I thought this would show some of the problems that have been slowing things down. I'll probably further modify this web page to include a picture of the dash torn apart when I download it from the lab.

One final note, in case you're not reading these web pages in sequence, I revised the web page before this one to reflect the design changes made to the firewall battery box. The page after this will detail the work completed once the dash is fully removed.