Dash Rebuild Project

[Randy Brown]

I thought I'd see if there was any interest in my posting progress on the on-going dash rebuilding project. I think I started this about 5 or so years ago when I was going to recover the dash. As I'm sure all of you are aware, messing with the dash pad produces very bad results:

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That's actually only the big pieces; there are dozens more stored away in a box.

What to do? I ended up using ABS cement to glue every piece back together into a single dash again (the plastic really glued well, surprisingly). But, the thing was still apt to fracture at the least provocation. So I decided to make a new one.

First thing I did was make fiberglas molds of the pad areas, and then made positives of the foam padding in fiberglas. This allowed me to keep the original shape of the padding as a reference:

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Then I could pull off the existing foam to see what was underneath.

I considered reproducing the plastic portion in fiberglas, but I didn't think that the existing piece would withstand the rigors of having a mold cast around it. So, I decided to do the crazy thing - build a new wooden mold and have the new dash pad support made by plastic thermoforming.

More to come if interested.

[HF Stinger]

Absolutey!

I will be doing some of this myself soon, these projects are a great resource when people take the time to post them here.

[John O]

I'd love to see more also. I'm going to have to deal with my interior soon and the dash pretty-much freaks me for all the horror stories I read.

John O.

[Darren]

Great idea Randy - I know TMH does a replacement for RHD cars, but not LHD. I would have thought you'd have a market for producing them on your side of the pond.

Cheers

[Will]

I would think there'd be a market for the occasional new dash too- they are not getting any younger and they always seem to be brittle even on cars with generally good plstic and rubber.

BTW Randy, you have one of the cleanest workspaces I have even seen!

[davidb]

Quite a project & a good job as well. If you want a close color
for the marbled, brownish Naugahyde bolster material contact
D.J.. He has an Oxen Brown sample I sent him. The original,
exact material is NLA, BTDT. Both the exact match & the Oxen
brown close match are Kenworth [semi-tractor trailer truck]
material. I paid $333 for a re-glue of the black plastic backing.
Glued, stretched overlay of the instrument panel sides. Upper
door bolsters, the "knee" bolters on the lower dash: left of the
instrument pod + the passengers's side. Nice & spongy as in
you can't poke you're finger thru it, compliant, looks new, feels
new as it is. Just a suggestion for material [s].

[Randy Brown]

Here's part 2.

Since I decided to go with thermoforming a new dash pad support, I had to have a proper mold. The original broken nightmare obviously won't work, so a completely new mold had to be made. I first had to build a jig to hold the dash at the proper shape as if installed in the car. This served as a working table for getting measurements, etc. Some aluminum channel and a long piece of particleboard stair tread did the trick.

The new wooden mold had to have the correct "draft" to allow the plastic molding to be easily removed, so the base began with an angle to allow no undercuts in the final piece. Jig with old dash is on the right.

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I built the the main sections (the blunted triangular cross-sections) from basswood boards and triangular supports, along with the piece that goes under the instrument cluster. After marking 1-inch datum lines on the original, careful measurements were made of the depth of the curve at 1-inch intervals along the old dash. These were used to cut 1/8" basswood sheet into templates that were glued at the same 1-inch intervals onto the wooden mold. Cardboard from a cereal box was used to seal the end:

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Finally, the spaces between the thin sheets was filled with Bondo and sanded smooth, along with the rest of the mold. Other wood pieces were added around the edges to provide a tight "break line" where the piece would be cut from the plastic (sorry about the messy workspace, Will):

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The entire thing was mounted on an airbox constructed of 2x4's to let me drill 1/16" holes at strategic locations to allow the vacuum to suck the plastic into the tight bends and angles.

In retrospect, this seems like it was entirely too much work just for a new dash. More on the results next time.

[Darren]

:eek: Wow!!! Now that's some serious work!!!!! Looking good and can't wait for the next update