Blue View - Bad Karma or Just Stupidity?

Our center console and armrest

Often when one of my seemingly good ideas goes badly, I wonder whether it’s bad karma or just stupidity on my part. A case in point...

One of the very first projects we did on Blue was to build a center console between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. Marcie’s seat had no armrest and there was no place to store maps, notebooks, pens, pencils, gps, and the myriad of other essential junk we typically need during a long road trip, so I built a console with an armrest on top that flips open so we could stow all our cockpit stuff. 

For the past two years, our center console has proved to be quite useful. One bothersome problem, however, was that I couldn’t find a good way to secure it in place. I tried all sorts of adhesives and double sided tapes, even the best of the best - 3M VHB tape, but nothing held for any length of time. No matter what I tried, after a week or two, the console would start working its way towards Marcie’s seat, making it difficult to fasten her seatbelt, or towards the driver’s side, making it hard to engage the parking brake. Time to get serious and screw it to the floor.

Drilling a hole in Blue’s floor isn’t something I do without some trepidation. There are all sorts of things under the chassis... fuel tank, wiring harnesses, sensors, emission control hardware, brake lines, and fuel filter to name a few, that work better without having holes drilled into them. Ford provides an upfitters’ manual that, among other things, includes ‘no-drill’ diagrams, illustrating the areas that shouldn’t be drilled into. I checked the upfitters’ manual, and the places I intended to drill holes seemed okay. Then I crawled under Blue and visually checked the area. All good.

I positioned  the console and drilled the first hole. The bit went all the way in without hitting anything solid. Strange... the floor insulation plus the thickness of the console base shouldn’t be much less than the 2” bit. After drilling the second hole with the same result, I crawled back under Blue to see whether the bit had actually come through, but it hadn’t. I tried one more hole, and when the bit was about 1-1/2” in, I finally hit something solid. Good news, but after a couple more minutes of drilling, I still hadn’t drilled all the way through. When I pulled the drill back out, it was obvious that I had overheated and ruined the bit. Ugh... time for a break, cool down from the Las Vegas heat, have some lunch and ponder this. I closed Blue up and headed for the house, pressing the lock button on my fob as I walked. Nothing - the doors didn’t lock. Great! Now my fob battery has died. I manually locked the doors and went in.

After lunch, I brought Marcie’s fob with me, but it also didn't work. Hmmm - either this is a really big coincidence and both fob batteries died at precisely the same time, or there’s a real problem with Blue. I manually unlocked the doors and tried the power windows... nope. Ditto the horn, air conditioner and wipers. The good news - Blue still started, and the instruments, lights and turn signals still worked. I hadn’t completely killed him.

To see what I had drilled through, I had to pull the flooring and insulation up, and to do this I had to remove the passenger seat and about a dozen trim pieces. When I was finally able to peel it back, I discovered a wiring channel with about 150 wires... and with three nicely drilled holes through it. I removed the cover, and after close examination, I found that, amazingly, no wires were broken and only a couple were nicked. One of these was a 1/2” diameter power cable, however.  The drill bit had nicked its insulation, then come into contact with the chassis, drawing enough current to char the bit before blowing a fuse somewhere.

What a drill bit looks like after shorting 200 amps to the chassis

Three nicely drilled holes through the wire channel

The nicked power conductor

Luckily, no wires were damaged other than the insulation. Liquid insulation worked nicely to repair the damage.

I repaired the nicked wires with liquid insulation, and before putting the flooring back in place, found a spot that I could safely drill the screw holes for the console. (Remember way back at the beginning of this long tale that drilling two holes was the original goal?). Then I closed up the wire channel, put the flooring back in and reinstalled Marcie’s seat and all the trim pieces.

The blown fuse. Unfortunately, the entire breaker panel had to replaced.

The fuse turned out to be part of a breaker panel under the driver’s seat. Accessing it required removing not only the seat, but the two starter batteries under it. The entire breaker panel had to be replaced, which was a $35 special order part. Our local Ford dealer got it in the next day, and a few hours later, Blue was reassembled and in fine working order. I even got that pesky console screwed down.

So, would you conclude this was bad karma or just stupidity on my part? It’s arguably a close call on the first hole, in my opinion, but the next two were definitely way up on the stupidity chart. After drilling that first 2” deep hole and not hitting anything solid, I should have figured out there was something wrong with my assumptions. And the really depressing thing? As my brother remarked after observing what I had done... you just can’t fix stupid. Sigh. 

Happy Halloween and see you next week.