Fascia

[jgbff7]

I have spent several days trying to eliminate the worst of the rattles in the car. I started with the door cards where on one side I found only 6 of the 17 fixings were present. Putting in the missing ones has helped a lot. Strangely a lot of noise came from chafing of the "cheaters."

But the really interesting bit has been the fascia. It rattled badly and clearly had missing fixings. So, in I went.

The workshop manual is a good place to start, section VD page 6. Being a bear of little brain it took me a moment to realise that item Captial A was secured to item lower case a, and so on. There are three elements to the fascia. First is the full width bit which has the removeable instrument access panel in it. Secondly is the "mask" which has the dials, radio and ventilation controls in it. And thirdly is the instrument cluster, the speedo, rev counter, etc in front of the driver.

The instrument cluster may be removed from within the instrument access panel. The fixings are obvious apart from the two lower ones which are behind the two blanking plugs on the fascia either side of the steering wheel. This is where it gets interesting. Those lower fixings connect the bottom of the instrument cluster to two metal brackets which are glued to the inside of the mask. In fact many brackets are glued to the mask and in my case were either missing completely or had come unstuck.

The workshop manual says these may be reglued and specifies a product "Double bubble." I had never heard of such stuff but something by the same name does exist. It is a two part epoxy glue.

What surprisesd me is that it was seriously thought that fixings could be glued to what is basically the foam inside of the mask. Where the fixings remained I glued them back with araldite and they seem to have adhered. But frankly it is not surprising that so many were unglued and missing.

Doing the fascia is like keyhole surgery, and quite frustrating. I found both fixing arms G and B on the diagram at p6 of the manual had disappeared completely as had two of the three A fixings. But a rummage through the "that will come in useful one day" box enabled me to cobble bits together.

It is time well spent with a much better fit at the end of all the work.

I am happy to wrtite this up for WikiLEC if that would be helpful.

John