Later, I bought a leather sport steering wheel from a 99 EMS in the same junk yard (...er, "salvage yard".) And a tachometer to use in the empty third dash board slot. (I think there was a clock in there before.) My dad helped me carpet the car with a nice smoke gray rug. He'd loved a Porsche 356 when he was younger, and honed a collection of super useful skills during his experience which we leveraged over and over. (Thanks DAD!)
After years of work, the car looked simply amazing. Unfortunately, I was breaking keys in the ignition regularly, one while on a double date... which I must say is a great way to impress a girl! The car was never mechanically up-to-par... it broke down often. It also only had four gears in the standard transmission, so when the speed limit changed from 55 to 65, I had that engine revved just to keep up with the freeway traffic. No air conditioning was another painful facet of driving in the heat of Utah summer.
The funniest mechanical kludge I remember resulted from a broken accelerator cable. When the gas pedal became non-responsive while driving home one day, I suspected something had pulled loose. I was wrong, the wire had actually broken inside of it's housing. I pulled to the side of the road, popped the hood and discovered the problem. After scratching my head and working on getting the correct combination of swears to unlock some good luck, I remembered a ball of string I had in the trunk (...er, boot.) I attached the string to the throttle body housing and unrolled the window. Then put the hood down and threaded the string through the window. I jumped into the car and drove home pulling the string to accelerate... what a pain. But, it got me home.