1973 Rebuild

I finally got the center console in today.

I had to repair a crack in the right rear corner, but that was no big deal. Some superglue, some JB Weld for plastic reinforced with fabric, some putty to fill what pits the super glue didn’t cover, and it’s nearly invisible.

I sprayed all of my interior plastic with SEM Landau Black, and this piece came out the best.

Other than the steel trim ring around the trays in the back, I used chrome paint pens for the silver trim. It looks okay. I kind of wish I had gone with silver leaf, but this is probably more resilient. The defrost emblem is done in white nail polish. I just masked the “choke” label. All of the hardware is new.

The ash tray was surprisingly easy. The rail was pretty corroded, so I cleaned it up and sprayed it with zinc paint, but the cover just needed a polish. All of the switches were much less clean, so they were disassembled and cleaned up.

I had to fabricate a terminal for the choke lever switch because it had snapped. I used a tab from some HVAC duct that gave me the same reading on the ohm meter as the original piece, so should be fine. I don’t know why the original had a hole in it, but it works without.

Speaking of switches, I also made myself a switch for my fog lights and mounted it in the console between the ash tray and the shift stick. I used a junked defroster switch I had replaced with a better unit, so it wasn’t a problem experimenting. It has to go in upside down so the light doesn’t hit the choke lever, which meant inverting the guts.

Basically I just popped the bottom out of the switch so the mechanism was reversed and put the button back in up side down. There was some cutting and filing involved, so do do this with a switch you care about.

The console already has bosses and a hole for a switch like this, I just had to cut out an opening in the trim plate glued to the top of the console for the switch to poke out.

The only issue is I don’t have a ground wire for the light, so I’m going to have to make a mini harness that will splice it into the ground wire for the defroster switch light. I think it looks great. The only thing I would change if I could is to make the switch green instead of orange.

The other modification I made was repurposing the choke cable for the starter valves on the Mikunis. I doubt I’ll ever use them, but it’s nice to have the lever actually do something.

I used a mounting plate for the lever because I didn’t want the console to crack, which meant a lot of fiddling to get things to line up and clear each other.

I will need to make a new bracket for the throttle and choke cables now because the angle isn’t quite right. The fuel lines are also closer than I would like. I have around 3mm of clearance, so I’ll put sleeves on the cable between the starter valves just in case. There’s probably something I can do to raise the cable more, but that will take some thinking I can’t handle right now.

Edited Saturday at 04:44 AM5 days by Matthew Abate