I finally built up the mental courage to take a look at the wiring behind the dashboard.
The 16 million cable ties were lovingly cut down and a tangle of Rapunzel’s locks revealed themselves. The number of wires a Mk I Escort is born with is a fair fewer than that required by a Subaru Impreza. So many of the wires were redundant – for example the air-conditioning, rear fog lights, fog light switches, interior lights. However, there were some that were still required like the cooling fans.
I found, to my disgust, that the under car lighting had been stripped out – as a style choice being forced upon me “ you can’t have under car lighting. It is unacceptable”. That did make me realise Mr Plump Pinkies really had no idea who he was dealing with, and signalled things to come. Had I not yet mentioned that I am from Essex? There were clearly going to be differences in sartorial choices.
I needed the help so I made the executive decision to let this one go. The lights hadn’t worked and I would put them back on later. I won’t mention that I want the Ford Subaru logo to project onto the pavement when you open the door, just yet.
I took out the plastic centre console, ripped up the carpet, and took out everything inside the cab back to bare metal, wires and pipes. I had left the seats in for comfort. However, I eventually relented and took out the seats. I found that despite doing hot yoga, I am not as flexible as your average mechanic, and I needed the space.
The air-conditioning unit was absolutely huge and would remain unused. If I needed heating I could always put in an after market unit. So that came out first. The air conditioning unit was in the passenger foot well taking up at least 2 ft.².
There was a loom running to the rear with over 40 cables, only four of those cables actually being used.
The speaker wires were a rats nest of pending disastrous proportions. These were all ripped out. It was still a mess under the dash so I had to make a plan of all the wires that were actually needed and work back from there: ECU check, lights, Horn, wipers, ignition…
I got bored of playing around with wires and set to designing the dashboard layout out. Because when you’ve broken your car so completely the first thing you need to work on is the dashboard and think about how pretty it should look…
Well that seemed logical to me at the time. I think it was the sheer panic of having little faith that I would ever see Bertie back on the road. I was clutching at straws for things I could easily do right at that moment.
Help!