It's the day after Thanksgiving 2012 and rather than go Christmas shopping on black Friday with ten bazillion other people I wanted to get the dashboard out. Plus, the weather was really nice and I hate working in a cold garage.
I removed the two 13mm nuts off the studs holding the dash in place and pulled the whole thing forward so I could study the wiring on the driver side. After 30 or 45 minutes, I had everything unhooked. I think there were 10 or 12 different plugs behind the dash on the driver side and in the radio area. All in all, it just took some patience to sit there and study (and photograph) each connector to see how it unhooked. That was probably the most tedious part because the connectors all seem to have different locking mechanisms and I wanted to be careful not to break any of them. My patience was rewarded because I didn't break anything any the dash came out without any issues on the first try.
I also emptied the interior out today. As I've removed various things I've been storing them inside the car and now that I'm getting close to being ready for paint I had to take everything out. So the interior trim, gauges cluster, switches, door pulls, tail lights, cargo cover, floor mat, bits of insulation, etc. are now all down in my basement.
I also removed the the Alpine disc changer and wiring the previous owner had installed. That won't be going back in. I have the original, Delco head unit and plan to put it back it.
With the dash out, I also removed the heater core since it was right there. I'd done some research on new cores a few weeks ago and found that copper cores are getting hard to come by. Most of the aftermarket ones are aluminum instead of copper and the jury seems to still be out on whether that's good or bad. A couple of the major retailers sell aluminum "universal" fit pieces inlet/outlet pipes that swivel and from what I read, nobody has been able to make one of those work correctly in a third gen. While the original core isn't leaking, I really don't to put a 30 year old part back in there.
I also removed the seat belt retractors from the upper B-pillar today and removed the driver side seat belt receiver. No sure why I left those in when I first took the interior apart, but they're out now.
Next up will be to remove the rest of the heater box from the interior, remove the AC wiring, dryer and evaporator from the engine compartment. Hopefully I can get that done before the weekend is done.