I'm slow, but I do get work done. I managed to find an afternoon to swap
out  my 81air cooled instrument panel with one I got from an 85 water
cooled. FWIW, the air cooled has two ground wires, only one of which is
actually ground. The second one is ground only when the parking lights are
off. Turn on the lights, and its not ground, which does all kinds of wierd
things to the tach, dash lights, clock, et all. Took me about two hours to
come to that conclusion as I was looking everywhere for a wiring mistake
when there was none.

To whomever threw out the fact that the 14 pin connector can be opened and
the wires interchanged, a very big thank you for bringing that up. Made
the job a piece of cake. Everything seems to be fine except the speedo.

The cable on my 81 speedo is threaded for a screw on speedo cable, whereas
the 85 version is so sort of snap on part, so I don't get to use the 85
which has the trip odometer for now.

As near as I can tell from Mr Bentley, the speedo cable comes up to the
dash from the EGR/OXS box which makes me think that if I had that piece of
cable from an 85 van, I could use it to allow me to have the 85 speedo
with the trip odometer. Does that seem reasonable? Oh, and gee, does
anyone have that piece of cable laying around on the kitchen table
anywhere? :-)

Much obliged for all the help and the pointers everyone offers.

Regards from Utah,

John