Still slowly working on the project in '08

Another year has come and we are still slowly making progress on our project. We haven't been able to spend alot of time on the car, but have made some good headway on certain items. The steering wheel gave us some trouble, but we took both wheels and made one from them. Also the Roadmaster instrument cluster was mounted into the dash assembly of the Impala.

My wife has become a master at the parts blasting cabinet. She has painted many of the chassis components as well as anything else that could possibly rust on the underside of the car with POR-15 paint. She has also been helping me with the disassembly of the interior of the Impala to make way for the new electrical system.


The steering coulumn fits nicely after being cut up, welded, and painted. We had to take the firewall mounts from the old wheel to mount onto the new one, take out the airbag controls, remount the Impala steering wheel, and paint it black to match the interior. We used the Roadmaster steering assembly because it has the cruise control, VATS security key, and it was a tilt column. Suprisingly all of the electrical connections match from the old system to the new one.

The instument cluster was a must have, due to all of the information that comes from the new electrical systemthat was incompatible with the old cluster. We weren't about to map out every system on the car, so the new cluster was a must, and it seems to fit in the old dash nicely. We belive that the new column and instrument cluster were good decisions to keep, and hope that they will work once we have all the electrical system installed.


Currently I am in the process of installing the electrical system from the Roadmaster into the Impala. I have eliminated most of the unused items that were integrated with the Roadmaster, such as power locks, windows, mirrors, keyless entry, etc... Now comes the hard part of incorporating the new electrical with the old. I plan on keeping certain electrical functions from the old car including lighting, HVAC, and a few other odds and ends. I hope that we don't have a fire when we hook up the battery! One more thing, as we were installing the electrical we found some rust in the driver's floorpan, and that will have to be replaced. We hope to have that done sometime this month, as well as the preliminary wiring. I will post more as time allows. Thanks for reading!