Project Pickle - paint and preparing for it was actually the easy bit (part 9.1)

 In case you haven't seen the status update from about a month, the paint scheme I most seriously considered was this very, very 50ies combination of a light mint green and a cream colored roof. 

You well enough know that this didn't happen, but let me tell you, I was pretty close. Another thing I wasn't even closely done with was to do more seam sealing. In hindsight, I am not even hoping to keep all the water out at this point, I just want to politely show it the sort of the right direction by now. 😉

The oldest joke when repairing old cars? "That'll be the welding part of it done." In this case it mostly has to do with the fact that the old antenna was nearly ripped out of the A-pillar and let the water in, which then resulted in the driver-side sill... you get the idea. Not sure, where I'll put the new one, but it most likely won't be here.

Hard not to notice: the windscreen is out. Compared to the Lada way too easy. Aside from the fact it shattered, because someone had glued the old windscreen rubber in and it was waaay too late, when I realised it. (Or in other words the glass was already cracked.)

The following picture shows the arrangement of all the cables going to air-vent-levers and as I couldn't find ANYTHING similar somewhere on the internet (and no the one from the later models is entirely different), maybe this one will help. Also, if someone knows which ones are hooked up incorrectly on this one... let me know, because the cable for the heater valve is way too long.

(Also some fine craftmanship with the powersupply for the radio bodged onto the cigarette lighter, if I may say so myself...)

With the dashboard mostly cleared out, this left only the heaterbox that needed to be removed. The first two bolts are very, very obvious.

And then there's this one, which goes through the firewall and hides behind the distributor.

Other than that it's just two cooland hoses and the fact that you most likely removed a small ecosystem from the vehicle.

As such, cleaning it out thoroughly and removing whatever lives inside makes quite the difference. (Quite a pile of moldy leaves actually)