Day 8- Pedal box

I had a few hours for the MGB- so I decided to remove the pedal box.  Basically- the brake master cylinder, clutch master cylinder, and both clutch and brake pedals are attached to metal box that is then bolted to the engine compartment. 

The pedal box

 The box is attached with 8 bolts, but only two of the bolts were actually installed.  Obviously, if the box is not rigidly attached to the car, the master cylinders move when you operate the pedals- not good.  The unused attachment holes were full of crud and rust, and the only way to clean them out was to remove the box. 

 The pivot bolt with both master cylinder forks- the hole below opens into the footwell

The pedal box- starting the removal. The brake master cylinder is on the left.

No real difficulty removing the box, except the pedals need to be removed first.  Just remove a single nut on the end of the pedal pivot bolt, drive out the pivot bolt, and they just dropped into the footwell.  The last step was top remove the hydraulic lines from both master cylinders (two for the brakes and one for the clutch).  I used an old turkey baster I stole from our kitchen (years ago!) to remove as much of the brake fluid from the cylinders first.  A flare wrench makes quick work of the line fittings- and out the whole thing came.

Brake pedal- soon to be stripped and painted

Once the box was out of the way, I needed to vacuum out about a cup of acorn shells- I guess some chipmunks had some good living arrangements in the past here! I cleaned up the area with some brake fluid, and then started cleaning up the cruddy mounting holes.  I borrowed a thread chaser kit from Ben, which worked perfectly.  You can see one of the chasers still installed in the next photo.  You just run the correct size chaser through the threaded holes a little at a time until it spins freely.

It's out!  The big oval hole in the firewall is open into the dash

Thread chaser at work- it's oily because of the lubricant I sprayed to help the thread chaser.  The two lower holes have already been cleaned up. You can see the black floor board through the big square hole where the pedals used to be.

That's it for this limited day.  I will have a blast cabinet soon- and it's first job will be to strip the pedal box, box cover, and pedals in prep for paint (or powder coating....).