Full dash swap advice

[Cooper69S]

a coupla months ago i decided to ditch the grey forte interior as the seats had been worn out by the police when they owned it, and i'd spilt house paint on the carpet and it was in pretty bad shape generally. bought a black SR interior from a wrecker in perfect cond for $650 - i thought not a bad deal for the whole thing, seats, carpet, door trims, centre console, dash...
anyway i did everything but the dash the weekend after i bought it, and put the dash in the too-hard-for-now basket.
well last saturday i decided it was taking up too much room in the garage, so bit the bullet and got stuck into it. surprisingly it was all pretty straight forward and it all went together nicely. my one mistake was that when dropping the steering column, i went to find something to support it with, but then bumped it accidentally, and it fell to the floor - it had pushed through the firewall into the engine bay and was quite loose. anyway i sort of pulled it back in and got it tight but was still plenty of engine noise so took it to ford today to get them to fix it. they charged me 3 hours labour ($366) to remove and re-fit the bearing that holds the steering column.
they said that they would normally remove the steering column entirely when doing this kind of job. my question for future reference is - how do you remove the steering column? is it just a case of undoing the small screw i saw at the base of it?
the only good news was the ford bloke said if they'd done the dash swap it would've been well over $1k in labour...
the black interior is very nice though i must say. just need to find a few bits and pieces the wrecker forgot to include like the steering wheel, gear knob, glovebox and a few other things...

[sly]

I took my dash out a few months ago to replace a leaking heater core. Had trouble getting the Torx bit needed to remove the airbag (I've got one now for when I get time to fit the Momo wheel and cruise control). On advice from my local Ford wrecker I just pushed the driver's seat right back, left the wheel on and dropped column & wheel to the floor. The wheel supported the column. It was & is all good.