Got home from work today and decided to finish pulling out the dash. I figured it was easier to work on the wiring if the dash was out; I’d also be able to go ahead and take out the carpeting and sound deadening as well. Is sound deadening removal worth it? Probably not on a ~2800 lb car with high 300 tq, but hey, this is always something I wanted to do with one of my project cars, just never got around to it. Funny though, all my previous cars have been low weight low hp cars (2 EK civics, 1 ae86), and I’m finally getting around to doing the sound deadening thing on a car that wouldn’t benefit as much.

The car as it sits now:
DSC02126 resized

If you look closely, you can see the steering wheel sitting on some books. When you loosen the bolts to the steering column, you need to support it somehow, something that the Mazda instructions neglected to tell. I decided that I should probably put something there when I saw it hanging by the wiring. Not good. There’s also 2 blue wiring clips on both the passenger and drivers side that need to come out. I found this out after a good amount of yanking. The bolts for the parking brake bracket also need to be taken off, and put aside so the dash has room to come out. The instructions I tried following really weren’t that good, but now I know!

FD3S Dashboard
What a pain in the ass. I’m not looking forward to trying to shove it back in.

Next step is to take a billion pictures of the engine bay and how everything fits, and strip it.

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