I'm finally getting somewhere with the interior. I had to wet sand & buff most of the interior due to overspray & slight orange peel - definitely a pain. I've gotta get better at spraying with upcoming parts!
Here's a shot of the interior after adding the firewall pad, glove box liner, and cowl vents.
When installing the pad clips, I found it best to use a home made install tool (long bolt with a couple nuts), then grab the end from the outside with a pliers or vise grips, and pull! There's gotta be better clips available.
The cowl vent gaskets are probably always shot on anything this old (the gaskets that go around the flap). I should have taken a picture, but I basically inserted a wide gasket scraper between the riveted layers & "widened" the gap, removed the gaskets, replaced, and used a rubber mallet to pinch them down against the new gaskets.
The next shot is of the seat and carpeting. The seat was the only thing done before I bought the truck. All I did was remove, sand, & paint the rails. As for the carpet, I did not use any adhesive - contrary to the install instructions. Think about anytime you've removed carpet from any vehicle - was it glued down? The door sill step plates and seat are more than enough to keep it in place, and with time, the carpet will mold itself to the shape of the floor. You want to be able to easily pull it up in case it's needed later.
Along with keeping the inline six and 3-speed tranny, I decided to keep the 3-on-the-tree shifter in the column instead of converting to a floor shifter. It took some straightening, sanding, painting, and lube to get it to shift decent again, but it's kind of cool. Here's a shot of the dash mostly completed.
I also sand-blasted the original steering wheel and filled the cracks with bondo, since it has just enough give to keep it from re-cracking (hopefully). Pic posted soon. The original fuse block had a few fuse clips broken out, so I plan to order the spade style Painless Universal Fuse Block from Summit. Anyone have any experience with one of these? Looks like a good solution since it has two flashers, so I can easily add a 4-way.