Removal wood dashboard (bottom row)

After a few days of cold weather, I finally went and bought a decent sized space heater for the garage. Not like it's doing any good - I fired it up a while ago and it read 44 F in the garage... it's up to 47 F now. Whee!

But, it's not as cold out there as it has been the last few days - so I got back to it. Today I decided to start pulling off the rest of the bottom row of the wood dashboard.

The biggest part of that task is already done - the dash part that sits astride the steering column, with all the various switches mounted to it. My cousin pulled that piece off years ago, when he had troubles with the igntion switch. (See a post titled "Current condition photos" or somesuch from late last year.)
The remaining bottom parts of the dash are much simpler to remove.

Here's the leftmost part, with the vent controls and clearance light selector switch. (At this point, I have *no* idea what "clearance lights" are. I'll have to drop a Dumb Question post on the Ponton group list I suppose.) This piece has a metal plate, attached from the back (in this case, at the top/bottom of the remaining wood on that side), with three holes for mounting screws. Only two screws are present, and they're completely different. I suspect this will turn into a running gag with this old buggy.

With the screws out, the only thing left is to detach the wires for the clearance light switch. Just a matter of a few flathead screws to loosen and to pull the wires out.

And there we go!

And now for the right side piece. Nothing holding this one in like the left side piece, so it'll come right out with the removal of the two-of-three mismatched screws.

On the ends of these pieces is another metal plate, screwed into the back of the wood - each with a metal post sticking out. That post fits into the hole you see on the right side of the dash (slightly obscured by the lining hanging down).

Another shot of the vent controls, and a bit of spider web. Yum.

Next, the glove box door. Here's a shot of the left side hinge. Two screws on each end of the hinges. Oddly enough, these screws all seem to match up!

Here's the left side hinge, held somewhat in place by yours truly. Initially I planned to unscrew the back side of the hinges, so the hinges stayed attached to the door. But alas, the top area of the glove box was shot and hanging down. It's rigid enough that it wouldn't budge enough for me to get a small Phillips head screwdriver in that space. So I ended up unscrewing the screws attaching the hinges to the door itself. I couldn't get the left hinge tto come away while attached to the door, so I pulled that out separately. The hinge has to be levered out a bit, horizontally. I imagine when re-mounting, the hinges will have to go in separately and then the door itself attached to the hinges.

Here's the left side dash piece again. At this point I was going to attmept to remove the clearance light switch. If you click the image for the larger version, you'll really get an idea of how damaged this piece is (and why I picked up some replacements).

Same piece, shot from above. It's tough to tell from this shot (this little digital camera isn't the best for close-up shots), but there's a small depression on the ring that sits against the wood. From what I've read about some other similar parts, I'm guessing I need something slender to get in there to pull this piece off. (Update: Thanks to Phil on the Ponton group... mystery solved. The bevelled ring simply screws right off. The depressions (one on each side, as it turned out) were a red herring.)

Here's the back side of the left dash piece on the top, with the replacement piece bottom. You'll see there's no mounting bits in that gap - it's just plain wood. I'll likely post a note on the Ponton group asking for guidance on this one.

And here's the entire bottom row of the dash pieces, the originals. Gap in the middle is where the radio would be.

UPDATE: Oops, I forgot something...

This item dropped out when I removed the left-end dashboard piece last night. I wondered about it briefly, then set it aside and kept going, and completely forgot about it until this morning, when reading a discussion on tools people use to remove the switch escutcheons - a discussion following up on my post last night on how to remove that toggle switch.

But, as I just learned a few seconds ago - literally - this is a completely different thing. According to Phil on the Ponton group, it's to hold a defroster tube in the upper part of the dashboard.