Greg,

I appreciate and I enjoyed reading your response. Yes, of course, I am considering just leaving it. I don't think I will make that decision for another few weeks. In 2 to 3 weeks, maybe less, we will be dealing with high temperatures above 40 degrees C and low temps of about 32 degrees C.

I will drive it one of those brutal afternoons and see if it can keep up at all. I also must factor in the use of the car, which at this point is a backup, but I also use it for a long distance car since my primary is a very small, great handling but associated rough riding vehicle.

Occasionally I have to take a long, driving trip for business reasons. If one of those trips were to come up two weeks from now, I could always tape over 90% of the fresh air vent and make the trip.

All this sort of reasoning is a little too rational for me. As you correctly surmised, part of the motivation to tear apart the dash is that I want the car to be correct. Also, I am a terminal carnut. I don't do my own car work because I have to, I do it because of the satisfaction and pride that I feel from doing it myself. I know, that makes me pretty sick, a glutton for punishment I suppose. I rationalize this some by the fact that it seems that every time I get someone else to do car work I experience grief due to their incompetence.

In this particular case, I do have someone that I know could do this right, but is it worth it to shell out $800 or $1,000 to have it done?

I take pride in the mechanical condition of this car and how nice it is to drive. Cosmetically it doesn't look very good at all.

As for your manual climate control, there are many of us in the US who are very jealous. I have a European version 240D that I drove over a half million miles with good ol' manual climate control. It never gave any trouble that I couldn't fix in a few minutes and those times were very rare. I have posted before how much I would appreciate this car if it were manual everything right down to manual roll up windows. In the US I am very lucky to have manual transmission. Only about 300 of them made it to the US in '88 with a manual and I searched a long time to find it.

I still hope that someone will let me know if I can replace the right side pod from the glove box access. If I can, then I might be able to get it fixed with very little trouble if I'm really lucky.

Thanks Greg and everyone. Please keep the comments and violin music coming.

Have a great day,