To kill a mocking dash

[admin <centre@orthomed.org>]

My vibrating squeaky dashboard and wheel was driving me majorly berserk 
last week. If I had to listen to that buzzing and rattling one more day I 
swear I was gonna climb a bell tower with a kalishnikov.
I had a right and front motormount put in last week. The vibrations were 
worse and variable from day to day. Some of you suggested it would be a 
loose rear mount, or misaligned engine, exhaust or demo'ed steering rack 
bushings. I checked it all out and everything was in top condition and 
aligned bang-on. The strangest thing was that over the last 3 days 
everything began quieting down to a large degree. My mechanic at VW who 
does lots of A1 mounts tells me that it takes a while for the right 
mounts to settle in-which seems to be exactly what happened.
Tonight I finally went after the squeeks. there were about five totally 
irritating sqeeks, each chiming in a given RPM frequency and rendered 80 
MPH, my chosen highway speed, off limits. 

To Fix:
1) Tighten hard the 2 screws at each end of the dashboard.
2) Tighten the 2 screws on the left wall of the glove box 
3) Take the liner out of the glove box and tighten the hidden dash mount 
behind it.
4) Take 1 inch foam rubber, cut some strips, slit them open a bit, and 
fold them around all wiring harnesses and secure with tape. Go after any 
wire resting against any hard surface.
6) swab a bit of rubber cement around every wiring harness tie down. 
5) Tape the 2 vaccuum hoses by the heater controls to each other
6) cut some cloth strips, and insert them in the jiggly gap between the 
flange at the back of the passenger side vent and the long air pipe from 
the centre console. secure the joint with duct tape.
7) Shove some light 1/4 inch foam between the long air pipe and the 
firewall.
8) Tighten every screw in the door liners (including speakers), center 
console, fuse tray

If you've attacked the problem in a suitably anal way your reward will 
be.... drumroll.. total f*cking silence throughout the RPM range. Really. 
I was surprised that it was that easy. In my case, virtually every screw 
was loose and most of the original tape was unravelled and the wiring was 
banging around in there. I've heard that 9 times out of 10 buzzing noises 
can be traced to those damn loose wires. Anyhow, you'll never know 
exactly what causes a given buzz, rattle or squeek but the general 
symphony can be minimized by ruthlessly clamping down on everything loose 
you can git yer hands on. About an hours'work.

greg
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