Viva GT: Start of the interior

Ss its a Bank holiday and the wind and rain are up, I thought it worthwhile doing some overviews of the work required to get the interior looking like a GT.

After moving the fuse box and alarm up into the glovebox the other week, it was time to turn the car around so I have access to the drivers footwell area. This means I can look at the dash, the centre consul and heater controls now.

A quick tidy up of the wires for the main part of the dash and a quick slip of the centre consul in place and I recognise the interior from 10 years ago, when it was stripped out.

My eye was first drawn to the centre consul, so thats the main focus of todays post. The original centre consul was broken in a few places and had the top cut off to fit a radio. I have repaired the frame inside and it now holds it all together correctly bar the very top edge. I will repair that later on.

First up was to make the cover panel for the top (where a radio might go) using an old consul I had obtained some years back. Sorry folks but needs etc.

Next was to look at the chromed plastic trim around the edge, its all scuffed and missing a bit at the top. Again the other consul donated some of its trim, which was then cut to shape to fit the gap at the top. Next all the trim was removed, cleaned and painted with some chrome spray paint I had. In the image below you see a test fit of the missing bit of trim, the finished article will be a lot neater and glued in place neatly, but its all painted in that shot looking 100 times better.

You can also make out a thin line down the centre of the gauge cluster, it was split here and along one edge, some superglue has sorted that bit out. The difficult bit which I am still working on it to replace the missing plastic speaker grill bars. Some trials have taken place but not worked as successfully as I would have liked.

So I moved onto the gearstick cover, first was to cut and clean up the hole so it suits the new gearstick.

Once that was checked in the car for space I worked on cutting down the after market gearstick gaiter to suit the hole.

By the end of today I have most of the consul rebuilt, I still have the gaiter to glue in place, the missing speaker grill bars to fix and decide on how to cover the hole in front of the gearstick so it looks neat and tidy. The end of today looks like below.

I am considering some matt or satin Back paint over the plastics to get them all looking the same and maybe some edge trim between the top and gauge sections to clean that up as well.