Near the end of January '08, we hit a real cold spell in the Chicagoland area just about the time I wanted to start doing some carpet and headliner gluing and rear windshield rubber installation. My garage is heated but only insulated on the walls and a lot of heat goes up through the roof and out the cracks around the big doors. So when it was only 6 degrees out, my furnace just ran and ran and ran without getting the Europa any warmer than about 60 degrees. Too cold for glue to take a set, too cold for enamel paint to harden and too cold to try and push the rubber window gasket into place. Gets a little frustrating when you want to get something done and you have a certain sequence of events you have to follow but you are limited in what you can work on. Patience! Wait it out rather than do something that you will just have to redo later.
When Rich sold me the Europa he threw in a few extras. One of them was a New Old Stock (NOS) set of carpets. I dragged the box down from the attic and noticed the shipping label was dated 1989. I opened up the box and was pleased to find a complete set of very sound and clean new black carpets. The 1 page of instructions was printed in 1981 so these things could be anywhere from 19-27 years old. No smell, no mice mung and just a little crumpled up from sitting on end for many, many years. I talked Sue into helping out here with one of her many wifely skill sets - ironing. I brought in a couple pieces at a time and she spent a lot of time with her iron and a lot of steam getting most of the wrinkles out of the black carpet set. Looking good honey! And the carpets aren't bad either!
The first carpet piece I decided to install was the large flat piece that goes behind the seats. I scoped out how the original one was glued onto the fiber board, tore the old one off and started gluing - turned out nice. I screwed it into placed and proceeded onto the next logical piece. What happened next was that whatever piece I worked on, it seemed as though I should have done a different piece first. Each piece kind of overlaps another and no matter which piece I picked, one or more of it's edges fit under another. In the end, the piece I put in first should have of course gone in last. Oh well, turned out OK, just the long way to do things. It's one of those deals where when you are done, you know how you should have done it and if you had to do another, it would go a lot faster - if you remember what you did. It's tough getting old timer's disease.
Since this new dash has a hole where the radio goes, I figured I should plug the hole with a decent Stereo. I just couldn't see putting the beat up, 25 year old cassette radio back in. I did a little internet searching and confirmed my conclusions with a Crutchfield salesman and placed my order. A nice Kenwood Stereo with single CD, a pair of Sony speakers, and a trick little antenna that I mounted in the front boot (trunk). (Of course on my next trip into Best Buy I found the same stereo on sale for $20 less - argh!) Since the car is all fiberglass, I don't have to worry about a metal body blocking my radio reception; therefore I was able to mount the little plastic antenna in the front boot. Can't even see it unless I point it out to you - right there. The Stereo mounted up pretty easily and I fished the speaker wires through the little tubes with the rest of the wires going out to the soon to be installed doors.
While I was figuring out what fuses to hook the radio up to, I sorted out the last few wires still dangling about under the dash. The one big red one that converts to a black with white stripe wire I finally figured out to be a kill switch that secretly mounts under the dash. After reading about this wire it appears to be just an additional point of heartburn and does not really provide any additional car theft security so I just coiled up both ends of the wire and tie wrapped it out of sight. If someone else wants a REALLY stock restoration, they can hook it up. Same goes for the Seatbelt warning buzzers that go under each seat. Your big butt activates a switch under the seat and it buzzes while it keeps the car from starting if you don't have your seat belt hooked up. No sense in additional points of failure. As to the last few wires, unfortunately two big wires which I thought hooked up to the window switches turned out to be a part of the ammeter gauge. This meant that I had to reach up under the dash, unscrew the amp gauge, pull it out and splice in these wires into the already short wires going there. The wires were short because a previous owner had changed connectors when he changed to an off brand gauge. I had cut the wires again to install new connectors to fit to an original style gauge - now things were really tight. But I got it all in.
Sometimes you just need something simple to grab, do, and finish in a short time when going out to the garage in the evening. It's nice to say "I installed the kneutsen valve today". Even if the kneutsen valve is only one piece out of a thousand, it's nice to get a sense of accomplishment. So since I really didn't have any simple kneutsen valves to install, I went to bring the spare tire down from the attic and was curiously surprised to find that it seemed to still be fully inflated after 10 years of storage. An original Dunlop SP40 tire? Maybe 30 years old? Hmmmmm? After further investigation I found that it was just petrified, as hard as a rock but without air. Felt like a solid tire from a two wheel dolly. I don't know if it would have been hard enough to support the car without air but I won't find out. I just filled it with air and installed it
Next - Europa Euphoria, Part 26
