,
…and voila! You’d never know it if I hadn’t told you about it… Though the installation was harder and more stressful than I expected, the results are well worth it. Most of the funk in an old car’s interior is in the carpet, so new stuff does an incredible job of rejuvenating the car.
Like every ‘90s Nissan, the original dash looked like a satellite view of northern Arizona. Once again, fortune smiled on this project, and we were able to salvage a pristine dash out of a 15,000-mile 240SX convertible that Nissan had stored indoors its entire life. The car was scrapped when they moved their U.S. headquarters from our neighborhood to Tennessee.
While there was nothing really wrong with the headliner, Sarah really wanted a black headliner. Nissan never made black headliners for S13s, and I wasn’t really confident with trying to paint or dye the original one, but as luck would have it, the junkyard delivered something almost as good. Nissan apparently did make a very dark blue headliner, and it turns out that once you install it, a very dark blue headliner is virtually indistinguishable from black.
S13s got caught in a nasty pre-airbag regulatory no-man’s land. Counterevolutionary passive restraints were required to help keep the terminally stupid in the gene pool, but airbags were not yet cost effective enough to put in a low-buck car like the 240SX. So, instead, we got this stupid motorized mouse seatbelt that attempted to strangle you every time you opened the door, regardless of whether you would have been smart enough to put on your seatbelt had you been given the chance. This, obviously, had to go.
Luckily, ‘90s Canadians could be trusted to belt themselves, so Canadian seat belts are a practical alternative. The mounting points for Canadian belts are still in the b-pillar, but the U.S. B-pillar trim is not terribly accommodating to the adult-operated belts. Canadian interior trim gets to be expensive to ship, so I figured out how to make this cross-border combination work. It turns out the U.S. B-pillar trim leaves lots of space behind it for all the mouse mechanism. So much space, in fact, that the whole shoulder belt mount could fit behind it. All I had to do to make it fit was cut a perfectly positioned slot for the belt to slip through.
Since the belt swings through a bit of an arc as you move the seat, I tried cut an arc for it to pop out of the trim through., with the center of the arc right where the shoulder belt pivots.
After drilling nice radiused corners for the ends, I finished the cut with a precision coping saw.
