Mission accomplished, ac now works fine.

For the next guy:

The mental piece that I was missing was that the cloth section comes off with the black plastic piece as one unit. I thought that the screws that I took out through the cloth aided the seperation of the plastic and cloth when the screws seperated the whole piece from support arms.

And yes, if you unscrew that wierd nut at the base of the steering column about 50 times it comes off.