Well I have made more progress on the dash! I went to the yard for another S-10 dash bezel to cut up and use for a gauge mounting solution. I also wanted to pic up these door panels with leather inserts I found previously in favor of the typical cloth ones I had. I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a totalled Yukon Denali while I was there. Much of it was stripped already but I found the dash bezel sitting in the snow which is slightly different than the Sierra bezel... perfectly different!





So since I seemingly found a nice theme coming along in the interior I took an edumacated risk and stepped things up a bit by purchasing a Silverado column off eBay. Luckily, I was able to mount it up to the existing upper column mounts in my dash by adding some fender washers to use as spacers! The lower mount has not been fabbed up yet but here it is half-mounted in place:


In order to get the appropriate depth needed to mount the Sierra gauges in a stock S-10 bezel shroud I had to hack out the bracing of the dash within that space and then apply some heat to the defroster duct so that I could malform it and gain some room. It may look like there are holes in it but there are not:


I will be changing out the wiring from this column to use the wiring from the Sierra which came with radio and computer controls in the wheel!

Since I swapped out the steering box for an Astro version I had already installed the needed XJ Cherokee steering shaft. Happily, I was able to take the lower part of that shaft, drill a hole in it, and mate it to the Sierra upper shaft:


(In the above pic you may notice the hydroboost unit in place as well as the '98-'99 F-body steel exhaust manifold... more on this coming...)

SO THEN! Things were still coming along nicely after I cut up the Denali dash bezel so I ordered a custom Denali blackwood style steering wheel!


Here is how things are coming together:

As you can see, the bezel needs some more trimming before I epoxy it to the bezel shroud and create a mounting setup... You can see the left over vacuum actuated heater control tubes on the floorboard - stupid things!