77tony

Removed the windshield before painting the 94, and noticed the felt. I think Rob is correct on his assumption that the felt tends to migrate up after R&R. T

miekojarvi

Replace all vacuumlines you can reach

SQLGuy

Thanks, but, why?

This is actually my 4th 928, and I've never had a vacuum line itself go bad. I've had vacuum actuators go bad. And vacuum fittings (in the engine compartment) dry out and break...

Did you notice spontaneous failures with your vacuum lines?

miekojarvi

Yes, replaved the heater core and forgot to replace the lines. Its only a few dollars and now I have 1 or 2 bad lines that need to be replaced

SQLGuy

How do you know it's the lines and not the actuators?

SQLGuy

OK. I'm ready to reinstall the dash now. It took a long time because it turned out my new-used dash had more cracks than my old dash. After checking on different options, I decided to get the cracks in the new dash repaired by a guy from Fibrenew. This took a few weeks, because the "local" guy was in the process of moving up from Dallas.

Anyway, he came over yesterday and repaired it, and a couple of small cracks in the pod, and the driver's seat (which had two long, deep, scratches in the back of it, and some fading and wear to the bolster). Overall, not cheap, but the seat and pod came out really well, and the dash is pretty good. The dash repair alone was $250. The repair carries a one year warranty. It's hard to tell from these pictures, but one good thing about the repair is that the color matches the dash perfectly. This makes it a lot harder to notice, unless you're really looking for it.

Other options I considered were a new dash (my dealer was able to find one), or recovering. The new dash would have run about $1700. Recovering is a lot cheaper for just the dash, but not so much once you do the pod, the center console, and maybe the armrests, to keep everything matching.

SQLGuy

By the way, one tip I can give for people taking this on is that the other two screws, which hold the dash to crash bar, can be accessed more easily than I did it...

For the PS one, remove the hose section that leads to the arm rest vent on the PS. This bit of hose will be very easy to remove once you have the glove compartment out, and you will then have clear access to that bolt.

For the DS one, the cable bundles and stuff under the instrument cluster block easy access, but if you look in and up through the vent hole that feeds the DS arm rest, and push the hose aside, you can at least see the bolt; then you can feed a 1/4" 10mm socket on about a foot of extensions in from underneath to get to it.

I figured these out while reinstalling, which made reinstallation a lot easier than removal was.

SQLGuy

OK. The car's back together, but there are two things I'm not happy with:

1. Airbag malfunction. Would just having the dash out cause the system to get confused? Or is this pointing to me having forgotten to connect something? I'm 100% sure I reconnected the steering wheel airbag. I'm am about 95% sure I reconnected the passenger one as well, but that was a few days ago, so I'm less positive. When turning on the ignition, the airbag light lights with all the lights, then goes out, then comes back on again, followed by the warning on the matrix display.

2. LEDs for instrument cluster. They're bright all right. What's annoying is that, while I had things still apart, I tried dimming them and they responded to the dimmer pretty well. Now they're just bright.

Any suggestions here? Especially about the airbag warning? Never saw this before the dash work.