With the front-end wiring done and the vacuum manifold fixed, I decided to turn my attention to the interior. It was an interesting adventure to say the least
. First things first: I noticed there were a couple of loose wires poking out from under the dash. One I spied was bare. I also discovered what looked like a radio noise capacitor laying on the passenger side floor. In addition, the tach needle was laying on bottom of the gauge. Oops.
Let's back up a bit: Initially, I had planned on a few upgrades (power windows, tilt-tele steering column and a radio upgrade) but as I progressed, it was easy to see the entire interior had to come out. And the previous owner blunders sure didn't disappoint... The front two mounting bolts for each seat were reasonably tight but all of the back bolts were loose -- I'm assuming it was this way because they're harder to reach. When I yanked the seats out, I found the seat belt anchor bolts were loose. One side wasn't even close to tight (see the accompanying photo). Not good. The window glass adjusters were loose – in fact, never tightened or adjusted.
Some pieces (electrical) were held in place with duct tape. The carpet was spliced in several spots and “fixed” with duct tape. I found a number of wires were spliced (poorly). The mix included four bare wires, four "amateur" spliced wires (a couple were twisted wire loosely wrapped with electrical tape), several Scotch Lok connectors, one broken connector, a couple of damaged bulb sockets, several missing fasteners, and one "mystery" added circuit that goes to the engine compartment. I also found plenty of missing fasteners. The fibre optic system (which monitors the exterior lamps in an early C3) was "repaired" with, and held in place with electrical tape. At this point, I knew the wiring harness had to be replaced. The repairs were beyond what I wanted to attempt. And I found a mysterious piece of binder twine holding something up in the driver side kick panel vent....Hmmm.
I have most of it out here:
Just about every adjuster was loose on the side windows:
This was really alarming:
This was actually one of the nicer harness mods/repairs I found:
This was more normal:
When you don’t have a zip tie, then use duct tape…L-O-L
I still haven’t figured out what this is holding. I asked the previous owner, but he won’t respond.
It is pretty much bare here:
And here’s the tach needle issue:
