when you pull the dash and replace it with a new one, you should use a very , very fine grit sandpaper, spraypaint it with a flat color that has UV protection and then spray a nice clear coat, i did it to mine and looks loike it has a forever amourall look, and it helps to protect it from the damn spiderweb cracks it can get in the top part where the steering wheel is at, oh, and one thing, if you have some cracked bolt holders that are plastic, get tho the parts stroe and get epoxy, you can make a nive mix and make your own new heavy duty bolt holes, i recommend you have a dremmle rotary tool handy cause when epoxy gets hard, it aint going nowhere. then with the dremmle you can mold it to almost perfaction

 

I was reinstalling my dash today and I ran into a strange problem - as soon as I connect the door side connector of the two on the driver's side - the horn starts immediately blaring - can someone shed some light on this? The steering wheel was never pulled from the car, and it blares the horn whether the horn switch connector on the steering column is connected or not. Looking for any ideas, it's going to rain soon and I can't get the doors closed until the dash is in. The only changes I made to the wiring harness was removing the audio wires I didn't need - the 4 wires for the back speakers, and two that went to an unused connector for the radio.

 

First, you should never be doing this with the battery hooked up. Second, you have an alarm system, Y/N? That is probably why the horn is going off. Disconnect the battery and get everything hooked up properly before you re-power the system.

The Haynes manual has the best write-up I've seen for dash removal.

It is possible to r&r the carpet without removing the dash or cutting the carpet, just takes a little creativity and finagling.

 

That turned out to be the right answer - I never found out what caused the horn to start blaring (no alarm system) but I disconnected the battery and put it all back in - then reconnected the battery and it was all fine again - the reason the battery was connected was because I had the dash out primarily to work on the air mix motor and I wanted to see if it was fixed before I got the dash all the way back in. Not that it made much difference in the long run though, because I heard it run so I figured it's fine - got the dash back in and I can't get it to change - when I heard it run it was cranking back around to full hot again. I guess I'm going to just disconnect that arm and put a wire on it that I can pull for cold air until I can pick up a new motor and logicon.

 

I've archived Wankel's dash removal writeup, with pics, on rotorhead.ca