It’s been 2 months since my last post. I’ve been busy at work but finally got my life back early last week. So, this weekend I was able to get back in the garage. Yesterday I spent some time mocking up the dash pieces on the bench. I needed to trim a little here and there so that the gauge cluster would seat into the dash structure properly. During all this messing around I noticed that the stamped metal dash “skeleton” had completely cracked and separated on the drivers side. I welded it back up and now the dash structure is much more solid. Unfortunately I have run into some problems. One is that with all the testing fitting I keep breaking the legs on the LEDs I’m using for the turn signal, brights and hand break. I broke one leg on the brights LED a couple of months ago and yesterday broke a leg on the hand break LED. I already replaced the brights LED and I have more LEDs to change out the red one but it’s annoying and I’m not sure how to keep the legs from getting fatigued from continuous movement… the other issue is that the underlying bodywork on the dash is developing hairline cracks from the movement. If I had to do the dash over again, and I probably will wind up doing it over 🙁 , I would use a single layer of fiberglass mat and resin to “lock in” the bodywork I did. Here are a few pics.
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- dash structure crack
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- dash frame crack welded up
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- bench assembling the dash frame, gauge cluster and lower piece