(NOTE: click on the images for a larger view.)
The previous owner of our 1983 Blue Bird Wanderlodge FC33SB, installed new Ramco heated, powered mirrors on the coach and then painted them the same color as the body. This really improved the look of the coach and made it nice to be able to adjust the mirrors without getting out in the rain. However, he never decided where he wanted to place the controls for the mirrors, so he hung them from the steering column with some wire ties.
Here you can see where the controls were. They were useable, but they were sideways and knocked into the driver's left knee getting in and out of the seat and during travel. This started to bug me, so I planned to move them over to the other side of the dash, next to the parking brake button.
The biggest thing I was worried about when I was marking the area where the hole in the dash was going to be was the nest of wires behind the dash. I certainly didn't want to cause more work than I had already commited myself to. What I ended up doing was to put in a sacrifical board that would reach from the floor most of the way up to the bottom of the horizontal portion of the dash, which held the wires out of the way of any spinning bits.
First I cut the vinyl and then used my RotoZip tool to cut the wood. When I cut the vinyl, I found that the steel bracket for the parking brake button was encroaching on the space in which I needed to cut the hole, so I drilled a bunch of small holes in the metal, worked the piece out with some Vise Grips and then smoothed the edges with a file.
This is what the controls look like in their new home. I ended up rerouting the wires for the controls (and eventually tieing them up under the dash as well, unlike in this view).This makes it so much easier to adjust the mirrors. In the original position on the steering column, left was up and top was right and bottom was left and right was down...too confusing for my brain while driving. Now it's like we have new mirrors!
