Interior

I've been doing the interior in stages, trying to keep it driveable in between the various phases.  First I vacuumed the dead field mice out of it with a shop-vac, then I gutted everything, scrubbed it with disinfectant, and put in new carpet and seats.  At the same time I converted from the original bench to factory buckets and console (seats from an old 2+2 I owned, console from a '68 Impala, but its the right one).  I also replaced the original column with a floor-shift model that I rebuilt and converted over to the Rosewood steering wheel.  This wheel is shown in the shop manual (and available on US Impalas), but I don't think it actually made the order sheet in Canada.  That'll be our little secret.

This picture shows the dash just after pulling the instrument panel.  Since in my "younger" days I had a penchant for installing aftermarket stereos using only the best pigtail splices and masking tape, I thought it was time to rip everything out and rewire it.  I also plan to dye the dash back to the factory blue: the original blue dash was cracked so a friend and I had replaced it with a black one from the wreckers years ago.

Here's a shot of the old harness... quite a rat's nest (likely literally at one point).  I actually managed to find an NOS harness for a '69 Impala still in the GM box, which I hoped would be the same: unfortunately, they use a different connector at the instrument cluster.  Who knows why, but it won't work, so I'll rebuild the old harness.

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