De-Mousing Prince Harry

You wanted it. You waited for it. You got it—the column about de-mousing Prince Harry, my 1969 Lotus Elan +2 (although, as I joked last week, the car behaves more like Harry’s spouse, and I think we can all agree that “De-mousing Meghan Markle” is actually better title).

Let me just spoil everything right up front and say that this wasn’t remotely like dealing with the mouse-infested Silverado a few years ago. No carcasses were found and photographed. You may read this while eating your Cream of Wheat.

To recap: I made an offer on the lovely red Elan+2 knowing full well that it had the wretch-inducing ammonia smell of mouse urine blasting out the vents, and almost certainly had mice in the heater box, as the seller and I literally saw a live one seek refuge there. The offer was calibrated so that if I didn’t need to yank and clean the heater box, I’d come out ahead, if I did need to pull the box, it would be what I expected, and if the contamination was substantially worse, like soaking the headliner, sound insulation and rugs, and extending to chewed wires, I’d likely regret buying the car. Two weeks ago I described cleaning the urine out of the vent tubes and sucking a large mouse nest out of the box with a rubber hose duct-taped to a shop vac, driving the car, and feeling elated that I’d knocked out the ammonia stench… until I turned the heat on and knew that the heater box needed to come out. And so here we are.

So, how do you remove the heater box in a Lotus Elan +2? The car came with a set of factory manuals. I don’t regard these as the be-all-end-all of repair info, as user forums usually contain much more information, but I was elated when I read the steps in the manual for removing the box. They were simple and common sense, like drain the cooling system, disconnect the hoses, undo the control cables, remove the four bolts attaching the box to the firewall. The step I didn’t understand was “Remove the facia panel (see section B).” When I found said section, my elation changed to dread.

The “facia panel” is the dashboard.

While it’s not at all uncommon to have to remove a dashboard to remove a heater box, I didn’t expect to need to do it on a car of this vintage, and it raised the specter of damaging the car’s lovely refinished wood dash. Plus, having already pulled off the two side panels to access the vent hoses, I already had seen the spaghetti-like 55-year-old wiring that connected all those gauges and switches, and the thought of having to disconnect all of it made me physically ill. I posted the question “Do I need to completely remove the dash to get the heater box in and out, or can I just tip it forward and out of the way?” to the Elan forum, and the answer was a definitive “Maybe.” Perhaps more significantly, folks said that the dash has to come out to do any number of things, so get used to it. The advice was to label every connection, then replace the original bullet-style connectors with modern ones that are actually meant to be mated and disconnected more than once in a car’s lifetime.

Faced with this level of work, the first thing I did was be absolutely certain there was no way of dealing with the smell arthroscopically as I did in the Silverado when I drilled a hole in the side of the box, withdrew the contamination, and flushed the box with enzyme-based cleaner, or as I did in my BMW E30 where I was able to remove the heater and evaporator cores and the fan and clean the box in place. I’d already snaked my $30 iPhone inspection camera into the box after I’d removed a Kleenex-box-sized nest, and found very little left, but I did it again. On first glance, there were only a few remnants, but when I got the camera into the crevice in front of the heater core, I found much more.

It was clear that Elan +2 car needed the full treatment. As I’ve written previously, the recipe for de-mousing a vehicle is:

• Locate and remove the source(s) of the contamination.
• Scrub the affected hard areas with an enzyme-based cleaner that reacts with organic matter, and rinse with water. If an area can’t be thoroughly de-scented because it’s porous, it may need to be replaced.
• Spray and wipe down any adjacent areas with the same cleaner.
• If necessary, run an ozone generator inside the vehicle to remove the residual smell that’s permeated porous areas such as the carpet, sound insulation, and headliner.

I’d avoided going full-in like this on both the Silverado and the FrankenThirty, but the Elan +2 was a vehicle that deserved it.

Several of the steps necessary for dashboard removal were bizarre. One was that the door light switches needed to be removed because they screw into brackets that secure the corners of the dash. That by itself is pretty strange, but it’s compounded by the fact that these switches are Phillips-head screws with a sprung plunger in the middle, thus eliminating any way to get a Phillips screwdriver into the slots. I joked that Lotus founder Colin Chapman’s well-known philosophy of “Simply, then add lightness” had been replaced by “Simplify, then add WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL?” To remove the switches, I needed to grab their circumference with a pair of Vise Grips.

The other out-there bit of design was that, to remove the dashboard, the back seat needs to come out. I’m serious. The reason is that the transmission tunnel is covered by a long one-piece trim section that begins at the lower corners of the dashboard and extends a few inches beneath the back seat.

The problem is that the L-shaped seat back and the cushion over the back of the transmission hump are a single unit. Both the manual and the Elan forum said that on certain years it’s held in by nuts and bolts, but on other years it’s secured by “squabs.” What, I thought—there’s a flock of pigeons back there holding it in place with their tiny British beaks? It turned out I have the nut-and-bolt kind, but the bolts pass through the back wall of the interior, and the nuts are screwed onto them—ready?—inside the rear wheel wells. I’m totally not kidding about any of this. To access the heads of the screws, you need to pop off the center rear cushion, which is held in place by snap-in fasteners. “Squabs,” by the way, turn out to be brackets. I was so disappointed that I didn’t receive The Full Hitchcock when I went in.

With the preliminaries out of the way, I detached the dash, tipped it forward to access the wiring on the back, labeled the handful of wires that needed to be disconnected (as well as things like the speedometer cable), pulled the dash as far forward as I could while imaging scratching and/or cracking it, and slipped the heater box past it. I photographed and wrote it up for the Elan forum so others could see it could be done.

Just as important as getting the box out was assessing whether the contamination spread outside of it. I was initially concerned when I found a coating of detritus on the sound-deadening insulation beneath the box, but it was simply fall-through from above as opposed to an actual contamination site. I vacuumed it up, sniffed, and smelled nothing, but I gave the area a spritz of enzyme-based cleaner for good measure.

More to the point, my gamble in buying the car as a beautiful intact running example except for the howling stink had paid off. The heater box infestation hadn’t spilled out and destroyed the carpet and insulation, I found no other nests or contaminated areas, and there were no chewed wires. If my last several mouse-eviction projects were far worse than I expected, this one more than made up for it. And the prize at the end—a fully de-stenched ’69 Lotus Elan +2—promised to be better.

I began disassembling the heater box on my workbench. Unlike the boxes on vintage BMWs I’m accustomed to that are a plastic tub with a lid, this one had four thin sheet metal sections and was held together with about two dozen little Phillips screws. I took enough of it apart to be able to slide out the heater core and see the one remaining area of contamination.

I then brought everything outside, dumped the mouse detritus, hosed everything down, soaked every surface with enzyme-based cleaner, scrubbed every inch, and rinsed it thoroughly. It took three soakings and rinsings of the heater core until it passed the sniff test.

Inside the box, there was both open-cell foam used to prevent the heater core from rattling, as well as closed-cell foam on the flaps. Although it was only the open-cell foam that had a persistent smell, I removed all of it and replaced it with new closed-cell adhesive-backed foam, and reassembled the box. I tested the fan motor and the motion of all the flaps.

No part of the installation was easy. Maneuvering the box back into place against the firewall made me wonder how I’d gotten it out. Similarly, muscling the dashboard back into alignment had me cringing with every push and twist. I followed the advice in the manual and on the forums to test that the switches worked before refastening the dash.

But just like the escaping prisoner who smells freedom as he climbs the last fence only to feel the guard dog sinking its teeth into his ankle, it was when I was testing the heat and ventilation sliders that I broke the lever on the heater flap, and suddenly was faced with the possibility that might need to pull the box back out and go through the whole bloody thing again in order to fix it. I’ll write about the outcome next week.

Note: Protect yourself. Mouse infestation isn’t just gross, it can be hazardous. In particular, mouse droppings can carry and infect humans with hantavirus, which is of particular risk in the American Southwest and Pacific Northwest.  An N95 mask (or even a respirator for bigger messes) is essential, as are gloves. Keep whatever you wear separate from other laundry. You’ll also need to do most of this job without the help of your shop vac so as to avoid stirring up dangerous particles. The CDC-recommended procedures to minimize risk also calls for use of proper disinfectants.

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Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.