It's hardly visible on this photo but I noticed the right half the speedometer is a bit dim cpmpared with the rest, so I suspect a lightbulb passed away.
Since I still had a few left I figured to have this tackled today. It's very easy to dismantle the dashboard:
It has many lightbulbs as you can see. But I had only 4 left. So I replaced the 4 in the middle
Despite the light is green, each of them had a blue condom:
And checked it out this evening: Paradise by the dashboard light:
Earlier this week I also had the cigarette lighter in the back inspected. It's the same lighter as in the front. It is however not equipped with a lightbulbholder nor has a separate powercable / connector. So I guess it's suppose to be like this.
The insulation cover on the firewall had some typical nasty brown spots. So time to tackle this with some black spray. You can see here, especially in the right hand corner, a lot of these ugly brown spots. So I taped off most surroundings and evenly sprayed it in proper black
And now having this as end result
Whilst I have been doing this I also replaced the top rubber strip since one half had a nasty tear. I should have cleaned it first but I will take care of that next time.
During my drive the next day the light of the other halve of the centre display became bright again. It's the so called SHIT fix! Self Healing Italian Technology. I was already fearing I had to dismantle the whole lot again but this is no longer required.
Next I tidied up all the cabling. On the right side, I had two separate antenna cables, I noticed they had clamped a black antenna cable to the original grey cable. So now I suspect this is the correct radio antenna cable to use. Also there was separate antenna cable for the telephone. And some ohter unknown black cable, used for the telephone carkit. In any case I had all of this tidied using tiewraps and properly put underneath the cover. Next I noticed on the passenger side these 2 unused connectors? Curious to know if they should be used?
On the left side I had these cables:
Turned out the yellow cable is going straight to the plus pole on the battery. Not sure what purpose it had but I left it, just in case I might need it in the future.
The other two cables ended up in the back. Clearly these has been used for the radio/music device which is no longer present. I suspect it must have been hooked up to a CD changer unit. Again, I left this all in tact. I don't anticipate I will ever use it. But I was not bothered to tear everything open to remove it. So again, I wrapped it al nicely up using tiewraps and put all the covers correctly back. For now it's good to know about these cables.
I also took the effort to swap around the passengers glovebox. Turns out they even had these available in 2 colors pending on your car interior.
Since the existing one is a bit scruffy I decided to swap it around. And I also used the required screws which were initially all missing. So all is now look good and firmly attached.
Whilst I had it removed I saw again this red cable with the specific mounting holder but I still could not see a logical spot where it should have been fitted. And in my coupe it's not present? Typical.
I made a new attempt today and swapped out a good display from my other Kappa. It was quite a bit of work and I will spare you the swearing and minor details. Lets get started:
And all is out:
I found a small comb underneath the handbrake :-)
And I spotted this device fiddled in below the radio area:
It's very likely part of the telephone carkit, so I had it all removed, still a bit of various cables to remove
And I had also swapped around the complete ashtray since something snapped off and was not closing anymore. And now was also a good timing to get this light renewed. It has a green cap and it's working again:
The ashtray lense was dirty and apparently had some kind of burnt markings, so it was not clear anymore
So I had this inner ashtray also swapped around, all clear again:
And also the cigarettelighter got a new bulb. Nice to see this is functional again and so bright:
In any case, all was put together and working. Except the right half of the display appears to be slightly dim. It's a tint darker and less bright. Not sure what's causing that? It's not very visible on this photo but in real its more noticeable. At least there are now no longer dots/digits missing.
Now I only need to put the radio back, again I'm swapping this one around for a good one. Then I need to remove the surplus cabling of the old telephone carkit.
Whilst I have been doing more cleaning this week, seats (again), cockpit, engine bay, the bonnet, I spotted some small items missing. Starting of with the 2 scew covers of the instrument panel:
So I had sourced these from spare car
And updated:
I even had the bonnet insulation cover vacuum cleand and spotted 2 missing plastic mounting covers:
And when polishing the bonnet I noticed another 2 push holders of the wiper hose watercable cover were missing
So I had these sourced and upgraded as well. It's all in the details.
Whilst I was doing the valve cover I also took the effort to have the wiring loom improved. As said earlier some of the hard plastic covers was crumbled and disintegrated. Other pieces had poor sticky black insulation tape used and was dried out etc. So time to remove as much as possible and clean out the rubbish. This was the remaining stuff that came off
And this is how it looked like afterwards:
So I had bought this heat resistant clothing wiring tape for € 11,-
What a great product! Still took a bit of time to had it all done properly but it was very easy with a great end result
And another task completed. Something I have never done before and was actually quite curious about it.
Overtime the valve cover had lost quite a bit of paint and it gives the engine bay a poor look. In this picture I had removed already a lot of paint, mostly the separate inner plate cover:
So I ordered a spray can of black wrinkle paint (VHT SP201). Price € 33,14 including shipping costs.
Luckily I once had bought a cheap sand blasting tool with sand so I figured it would be easy to remove the remaing paint:
But I was wrong, despite some paint was blown off easily most of it was firm. So I ended up buying a can of paint remover. Which did set me back a € 20,-
This removed additional paint but still some parts did still had paint left so I ended up also using a copper brush and sandpaper
So once this was mostly removed I further cleaned it with Thinner (a new bottle bought for € 5,-) I put 3x times a small coating of spray on it with a interval of 5-10 minutes in between. And afterwards used the heating gun to dry it. Shortly afterwards I used a scraper to remove the paint from the stripes and letters whilst the paint was still a bit soft. After that I simply used sandpaper to make it blank and shiny again.
The full valve cover I simply replaced from my other car which had a good one and didn't require respraying. I bought that one a few years back new but didn't came with the inner plate cover.
So time to have it removed, easy job. They used some sealing as well for the gasket. So that has been cleaned off as well.
I had ordered a new rubber gasket as well. This costed € 20,85 including shipping.
As for this valve cover, previously there was oil in the sparkplug area. This was no longer present. As said, this was potentially due to a loose spark plug. I did not spot any cracks in the cover or whatsoever. In any case, the valve cover is now being swapped for another one.
So time to put everything back together. Throughout the week I had already cleaned the engine bay a little more since the paint contained quite a bit of dirt. Small section example:
But now with the upgraded valve cover it looks pretty well. Not perfect but good enough for me as it will not become a show car in any case. So total round this time costed about € 80,-
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