fresh air vent – One Man And His Mustang

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This week at Mustang Maniac I had a mail to say it was cold and snowing randomly. I took the hint and packed some thermal clothes and drove to the yard. I emptied my boot and took more of the cleaned up parts to the car to see what I needed to do. Adam and Yogi had a conversation to see what was the best way forward and the general verdict was the under dash fittings. That was going to be the wiper actuator arms, wiper motor, hand brake lever and the drivers fresh air vent. I was also given a few grommets to seal some holes such as the fuel line and the gas pedal to the fire wall. The idea was to fit these parts before the main wire loom gets in place and in the way.

The first job was the wiper actuator arms, these are stamped left and right for good reason as they have limitations to how far they will move.

The ends of the arms have three bolt holes that will attach to the underside of the dash. The fittings also have a gasket to seal the water from the inside of the car. I reinforced this with some gasket sealer before I bolted it to the car.

As this was a newly painted cowl I inserted the bolts into each fitting and made sure that the paint would not stop the bolts going into the holes. A small bead of gasket maker was applied to the rubber gasket and moved under the dash. The original gaskets were made out of leather believe it or not! The next trick here was to put the windscreen wiper arm lug through the hole without damaging the paint work. I started on the left side as that was the easiest access and out-of-the-way as a dry run for the more tricky drivers side. With the fitting in a rough position I inserted the bolts and took them up to finger tight. I tightened up the bolts in sequence until they were tight.

The driver’s side was awkward to get to due to the brackets for the dash gauges, variations of wobble bars and spanners were needed to tighten up the bolts which is a lot easier without the wire loom in the way. Again a dry run with a bolt to clean the fittings. the same procedure of gasket maker was applied and gently located through the hole.

drivers side

As you may recall from a previous post last year my old two-speed wiper motor was involved in some sort of under dash fire resulting in all the wires burnt away before I got the car. A two speed replacement is pretty rare and I wasn’t able to track one down. The resolution was a new upgrade replacement from New Port Engineering.

close up of damaged wires

damaged and melted

original on the left of course

back view

I created a post for the replacement of the wiper motor, click here for the quick link and I posted a YouTube video of it all working, click here for the video quick link. Anyway, same process to fit the wiper as before. The motor was already mounted on the bracket that has two bolts at the bottom and two at the top which are slot ins for the bracket. The most difficult part of the process is to fit the actuator rams onto the link pin from the new motor. this requires a lot of patience and little persuasion with a something small to tap the arms in place. I coated a generous layer of copper slip grease inside the arm holes and the pin. The final step is to clip the “e-clip” to the top of the pin to stop the arms lifting of. That will test the patience of a saint.

slot bolts

bottom bolts

arms located to pin

Feeling pretty pleased with myself I moved to the fresh air vent on the drivers side. this is a case of three bolts attached to the underside of the cowl. A gasket sits on top of the vent to stop draughts.

mounted in place

The control wire for the vent runs under the dash and to a bracket. This bracket sits on the visible side of the dash, and the bolt holes are on the end of the hand brake lever. After I fitted the air vent the hand brake or emergency brake needs to be fitted. The two bolts at the bottom go through the fire wall and the wire through the hole next to it filled with a rubber pipe to seal the hole. The top of the hand brake is on the inside of the dash and the air vent bracket bolts will attach to hand brake lever to form the sandwich and hold it all in place. I refurbished the hand brake lever previously and for the quick link click here. With the rubber for the hand brake in place I applied a small bead around the hole to make sure water proof and draught proof.

bottom or brake lever

handle

air vent bracket

All in place and took a while, yet nobody will see it. The final part was to fit the gas pedal grommet, this is simply slid up the inside section of the pedal and the domed part of the grommet faces into the engine bay.

Error happened.

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The stripper was of course the chemical sort to get me down to bare metal on the underside of my car. There are so many innuendos I could use for this post, but I wont go down that route. The day was of course at Mustang Maniac where my day of hard work was to begin. The car looks quite menacing when you stand there with just a three-inch scraping knife. I used some stuff called Starchem – Synstrip. This has been given quite a few reviews on how good it is. The old school strippers like Nitromors has had an ingredient change due to new laws or health and safety for what ever reason. The results speak for themselves, they don’t work like they used to. So this stuff is one of the few old school strippers left out there that you can get your hands on. Professional use only with disclaimers all over it on the label. It took notice and used goggles, face mask and gloves. Is the stripper any good? I shall review it fully soon, but it does burn like hell on your hands, that should give you an idea.

Anyway the car was given a good slap of the mixture on the under seal and it was obvious it was attacking not just paint but under seal, tar and any other stuff sprayed on it. It was going to be a long day, the first attempt removed a lot, the second exposed the base paints and we were almost there with the third. Why take it all off? Well, we wanted to see what was under the sealers to see what work need to be done or what filler needed to be removed. So a tip is – don’t buy a car that looks great as it could be covering a multitude of sins. It’s better to see bare metal and you know exactly where you are. I exposed a bit of filler around the welds, nothing to bad as it was just to smooth it all out. There was some real good clean metal by the tunnel gearbox area and a little surface rust on the rear panels by the fuel tank partition. The work was slow, made my arms ache and Adam gave me hand towards the end of the day too. What a difference it has made already. I will start on the other areas next week if I have recovered enough by then. Hopefully there will be a lot more bare metal all round next time. The process is apply the liquid, let it bubble up, scrap it off, add more, rub it in with wire wool, scrap it all off and repeat. The pictures I took after each treatment, you can’t really see a huge difference between the sessions, start and finish there is a difference.

What it looked like:

After the first session:

After the second session:

After the third session and the end of the day, we rubbed the chemicals down with thinners to see the bare metals. The surface rust will be attacked again with a little aggression where I can. Anything that looks bad – we will replace and patch properly.

Well that was all day Saturday taken care off, Sunday I was rubbing down my driver’s side fresh air vent. It was a real mess and needed rubbing down, primer, and a couple of top coats. I have added the full process under my Photo Menu – Inside The Car – Drivers Air Vent Refurbishment, or click here for the quick link. Here are a few pictures of the before, during and after. My arms are killing me and I am pleased with the results. for both days. On the assembled pictures for the air vent the finger prints were my oily fingers, it wiped of clean. Unfortunately there is too much exciting stuff to look at here apart from different angles of course. I was well chuffed with the results, even if I do say so myself.