Moving along on the wiring, albeit slow.  Today, I spent 6 hours working on wiring up the instruments.  I was able to re-use some of the looms I made up the firs time, but had to make plenty of alterations along the way.  This is what it looks like from the backside:

The gauges are VDO Vision.  The have been great and are all electronic, compatible with the ECOTEC.  The speedo is programmable, so it is 100% dead nuts accurate.  The backing plate is aluminium and the front is made from quilted maple (I’ll have pics of the front in a later installment, once the dash is in place).

I realize this looks perhaps, unimpressive – but a huge amount of work has gone into making this up.  Every single connector has been soldered and shrink wrapped.  Since I wanted to make this so it can be removed easily, every circuit is connected to a “Weatherpack” connector.  This is why it has taken so long to make.

The following picture shows the dash area in bowtie6 before the dash goes in.

So…  What do we have here?

• The heater has been replaced with an aftermarket unit.  The “original” heater unit I used to have developed a leak.  A little research found the unit pictured above which was a) cheaper and b) more efficient.  Plus it is able to withstand higher pressure.  This is desirable since it allows a high PSI cap on the radiator.
• The transmission tunnel has been made from scratch to match the ECOTEC’s AISIN 5 speed gearbox.  It will be covered soon in Dynamat Extreme, just like the rest of bowtie6 has.
• Finally, the piece de resistance:  If you look close, you can see the steering column is now fully adjustable.  Yes, a special mechanism has been made by my cousin Jim that allows the column to tilt with the flick of an adjustment bar.  I’ll have more on this later, once I get it all bolted back together.  Trick, huh?

This wiring effort has been very time consuming, but the end result will be fantastic.  There is a huge satisfaction from wiring up a car from scratch.  Not many people can do this type of work – it takes patience, but it sure is a lot of fun.