2Azteks
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« Reply #17 on: August 08, 2014, 06:07:00 PM » |
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That's about as good as it is going to get. I have a 2001 that did that and I eventually glued it down with either contact cement or weatherstrip adhesive, I forget which. The pad had definitely shrunk. I just live with the gap. The elegant thing to do would be to put some sort of homemade rim piece over the gap that will itself not come up.
The only way to actually fix it is to replace the dash. The dash pad is not separate. The dash, as somebody mentioned is unavailable but if it was, the price was $1100 from the dealer. I thought I might get one from the junkyard, where they are plentiful. The problem is, it took me 5 hours of continuous work to get it out. And EVERYTHING in the front of the car has to be disassembled. The shifter cable goes through it. Everything, A/C, Radio, wiring, steering column, instrument cluster, console, is either attached to it or goes through it. And I wasn't exactly being meticulous when it took 5 hours to get it out. So to pull the old one, make sure all the wires and routing and clips and everything was marked and documented and to be careful not to strip or break anything, would have taken me 15 hours more hours to pull the shrunken one and replace it with a good one. In the end, I decided to live with the gap.
But now I have a similar problem with my other Aztek. I took the trim off the dash to send the instrument cluster out for repair and while I was waiting to get it back, the 140 degrees inside the car separated the dash pad from the dash. The pad is not shrunk, but it is separated a good 6 or 8 inches back and pretty wide and the old glue has no adhesion at all. Whatever glue I used on the one with the gap was only sort of OK. A year later it is coming up a quarter inch here or there on the front edge of the gap. I am reluctant to use a rigid epoxy like JB weld so I am looking at various forums and they seem to like DAP Weldwood in a spray can or a gallon can. Since I know the edge on this one will tuck back under the trim edge, because it is NOT shrunk, I am temped to just use the weatherstrip adhesive or rubber cement and smear it in the gap with my finger and whatever thin tool I can get back in there with. There is no way to get the old glue off either surface, so you are really gluing glue to glue, not vinyl to the resin dash.
Any opinions on the best adhesive for this?
By the way, both of my Azteks had the Versatrak failure. #1 got a replacement from the junkyard. #2 had the thing removed and discarded. Except for having to live with the warning light, #2 is the better solution. Nobody rebuilds them, they are crap, the junkyard one will fail eventually also, and a new one from the dealer costs $3300.
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