Excellent job. Your right, it often seems like somebody sat a heater core on the assembly line, and then they built an entire vehicle around it. Crazy enough, it gets a lot worse. On the old boxy Volvos, you pretty much had to tear the entire interior out of the car to get to it, dash, console, seats, everything but the headliner. For many Volvo "brick" owners, the decision to pull the plug was not the usual rusting out, shot motor or trans, it was the point where you said to the mechanic, " It's cheaper to find another car than spend THAT much for a new heater core". The old Chevy vans were so ridiculous that a buddy of mine, who had a whole fleet of them, would take a sawzaw and neatly saw the dash in half, rather than paying the insane cost of countless hours of tearing the van apart and reassembling it, to swap the core out.
