I've been asked on many occasions how I make consistent progress on projects. The first reason is simple - my wife is totally awesome. Aside from being smart, sexy AF, and a hard-working professional, she understands that we all need our personal time to decompress and empty the bucket a little bit. For me, working on my rigs is really the only thing that I can do often enough to make it worthwhile. The second reason - I'm a huge dork; making spreadsheets, to-do lists, gantt charts and timelines are half the fun
So naturally, I made a rough timeline to post in the garage...
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After a weekend in the high 80ºs, I know that summer is around the corner. As a result, I need to get this thing ready for paint ASAP and get it prepped and sprayed before the daily low temps push into the upper 80ºs until October (even if still sitting on a cart!). With that, I took advantage of some free time and started gutting the interior. I found some interesting info along the way. Pulling the airbag revealed an unfortunate issue:
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I was honestly up in the air about removing the airbags anyways. These are pushing 25 years old and my dash wiring has been what appears to be a pieced together harness (at the HVAC side) and has been repaired at the ignition switch (see below). I could reuse the space where the passenger side airbag resides for my micro-amplifier as well as my CB module. I could also run my preferred Grant 14" thick-ring steering wheel rather than the one in there now. The only reason I may keep the current steering wheel would be if I could retain the cruise-control switches to work with my Hemi ECM's built-in cruise control.
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One thing I have never seen mentioned was the spare harness leads that Jeep included above the fuse box:
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It is a slow and tedious process since I'm unfamiliar with the plug connections and support brackets of a TJ, but I eventually got it completely stripped down...
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While everything was out, I took the chance to pull the brake/clutch pedal assembly. It appears to be a perfect match to the replacement auto-tran brake pedal assembly I got off of eBay.
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Next up is to pull the seats and find a place to store these interior parts so I don't step on them in the meantime. I also have a new heater core and evaporator, so I will rebuild the HVAC box and have that ready to go once the tub is painted. I'm thinking that now may be a good time to undercoat the tub. I know a few people have use Lizard Skin with good success. While I don't believe that it's as effective against temperature insulation as people make it out to be, it does have a nice texture and should hold up well to road debris and add some noise dampening.