Purists avert your eyes...dash sacrilege ahead

[DC Townsend]

I really, really wanted an early dash for this project but every time I found one that was in decent shape, it seemed like it was a $400 ticket. I'm not cheap (okay, I'm thrifty) but it just seemed like a lot of dough (and work) to retrofit the early steel dash into my '78 'B'. What's a boy to do? Improvise! Here's what I started with.


After dismantling the insides (and outsides) and a whole lot of other work (see '79 B dry sump thread in "projects' area), I pulled the dash and stripped it down to the bare metal over last winter. Then I removed all of the metal work that BL added on to support the dash foam, filled in all of the spot weld holes, repaired a few rusty areas and did some reforming to give me clean lines from side to side. Here's the repaired dash in primer.


Then I needed to bend a glove box door. Waaaaaay fun. Compound curves, irregular shape. Took me two tries but I finally wound up with something acceptable.


Next thing was to wrinkle paint, reinstall it in the car, add instruments, etc.


If you'd like to see the (nearly) complete dash installed, visit the build thread in the projects section. Installed dash shots are at the end (warning - it's prolific).