Posted by GraemeG on August 02, 2000 at 23:33:15:

In Reply to: Dash Refinishing posted by Doug Cain on August 02, 2000 at 07:41:48:

Gosh, it's over 12 years since I did this...As I recall. the wooden fascia sits in a body pressing of roughly the same shape. If you lie on the floor, open the glove box, & look up, you might see one of the bolts holding the wooden frame down. That's the easy bit.

Your problems begin on the driver's side. The vinyl 'cowl' over the instruments (the first thing you need to address) has two protruding bolt threads which pass through holes in the bodywork & should be secured by two nuts. To get to them you need to drop the panel beneath the steering wheel, reach up, and somehow loosen the nuts. You are going to swear a lot. The nut nearest the centre of the car will be nearly impossible to reach. If you're lucky, someone else in the 30-year history of the car will have not replaced it after previous work!

When these are undone, you should be able (with some jiggling about) to slide the cowl towards you until it (just?) clears the main under-windscreen black fascia. That panel should come out once you've freed it from the aluminium keepers near the door frame. Except, of course, that it's got the windscreen demist vents all tangled in it. More scrabbling under the dash to free them. Incidentally, while you're doing all this, you can bet that Karmann put the windscreen in last!

The wooden instrument cluster itself is also held in by two nuts, but with the top cowl removed they're easy to get at. There's a real spaghetti junction of cables there too before they feed into the plug - if you want work done on the instruments I suggest just taking the whole clustered 4 of them to the repair shop

After that any further dismantling is pretty self-evident I think. That's not to say its easy. These are virtually coachbuilt cars, remember. It's easy to see why BMW wasn't all that happy with Karmann's assembly work and moved the show in-house for the 6 series

My memory of all this is a bit vague. You know how you try to repress the memory of your worst experiences! Hope this is of assistance...
cheers,
Graeme.