But all's well that ends well. Really, a few clarifications in the instructions could have saved me literally hours but in the end everything actually fit and looked just fine. I didn't bother with hoses (no AC hose crimper yet), electrical (no wiring in truck yet) or duct work (would all have had to come back out anyway and not anticipating cutting/drilling for those).
Pulled the evaporator back out from under the dash and packed up all the left over parts for final install. Next up, I've got to redo some bodywork on the firewall where welding those evaporator mounting bolts to the inside of the firewall caused filler/primer bubbling and I've got to redo the filler on the door edges where I "fine tuned" them a few weeks ago. Ordered some 2K Urethane primer/surface from Eastwood for the block sanding stage coming up. I'm actually kind of excited about that. Not the spraying and block sanding part, but knowing that after that I should be ready to paint
