Well folks, here we are with the final stages of my dash conversion.
For the heater control cable I had to use a control from a Toyota (Don't ask which one I didn't think to check...sorry..
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Anyway, best thing to do here (On reflection) is remove the actual mechanism and fit it to a piece of right-angle plate, it will do the same job with less hassle.
(I had to hack away a lot of plastic...
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OK, so first thing is to take the little silver clip off of the end of the heater cable
Then clip the bent end of the cable and re-bend it to fit into the end of the arm on the Toyota control
With this in place you then need to position it behind the switch panel, here I should have put this on the right as the cable is long and mine is now a little tight as a consequence of putting it on the left (I just didn't want to rip the whole centre console out again!)
Anyway after much shoving and cutting I finally managed to get it in position (After moving the alarm sensor onto the right hand side)
Incidentally I had to use the old Vauxhall badge as a front plate as there are 2 screws going through the front of it holding the Toyota control unit in place, the large dial hides these screws.
The Toyota control is ratcheted which, along with the tightness of the cable makes it a little stiff, I may get hold of a shorter cable at some point and redo this. If you fit it into the right hand side however, you shouldn't have so much of a problem.
Heater now works although there is no illumination or scale (Yet!)
The final thing I needed to turn my attention to was the ducting around the glove box, this was a pain as the Senny one goes over the top whilst the Carlton one goes underneath, chopping and 'merging' the ends didn't go quite as planned so I used some of that flexible aluminium stuff you use in heating ducts, not only is it easy to cut but with a bit of gaffa tape it was easy to graft the relevant ends on.
Now, at full diameter this ducting will still not fit, however being flexible and crushable you simply squeeze it and pull it to the shape you want and ... job done.
It ain't pretty but it works and at the end of the day nobody is going to see it.
So that my friends is about it.
Several people on this forum and others have said they wouldn't tackle it because of the complexities involved and to be honest I wouldn't want to do another one unless I had about a week to do it and a garage to do it in, that way I would have the room and the time to deal with all the little 'problems' that crop up.
Don't let the complexity of my instructions put you off though, the whole idea of these 'How To' sections is to encourage people to take that first brave step and find out what really goes on behind the scenes in their car...
If you do attempt it then good luck, don't be afraid to ask if you get stuck, only too happy to help...
