metaruss

Hacked off the old core support and the 20lbs of random steel that had been welded to the frame rails for it.  Wore out 2 cut-off disks and one grinding wheel for the angle grinder to do it.  Brad just so happened to hack the whole nose off of an ’88 J-body a while back, which I picked up from him a few weeks back.  The spot-weld drill bit from Eastwood was really handy in separating the two halves.  I’m going to add some reinforcements to this thing on the inside so that it can take some abuse.

I also fabbed the brackets and installed some bolts/studs in the tunnel to adapt the ’91 center console to the car.  I finally have my head around the different types of late-style G-body center consoles and I finally have the parts I need to do what I want, thanks to Paul Fosen.

There are two completely different center consoles and underlying bracketry available.  There is the “cockpit” sytle, where the console is several inches higher than the normal one.  The extra height is split between the top plastic part and the side “fuzzies”.  The ash tray then completely blocks off the lower two bays in the center instrument panel.  All you get is the radio and the heater/AC controls, which means the bezel around these is missing the bottom half.  It also requires a different e-brake arm and the bracket under the console raises the shifter partly, but not completely up.  The leather boot around the shifter is huge as a result.

The “normal” style lowers the center console by several inches, revealing the lower two bays.  The bottom bay, used for the factory CD player, may be blocked off by the plastic in front of the ash tray.  It may also be filled with a little fuzzy storage bay when there is no CD player.  I’ve seen both.  The instrument panel bezel is then extended to surround these two bays and meet the center console.  If you ever do anything like this, grab all of the center console parts and anything that goes near it.  If you factor in manual-vs-automatic, there are four possible setups for these things.  The cockpit style console may have been obsoleted after 1991, as I have never seen one in a ’92 or later.