How To Refurbish Your Dashpad

[OldFatBald]

Bought some mesh material at the local hardware store along with a can of foam. Cut the mesh to size and glued them in place using CA glue. The CA glue worked very well.

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[OldFatBald]

Foamed it up and left for the evening.

The next day I used a combo of blades and my little grinder with a 3” 30 grit disk to knock down the foam.

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[OldFatBald]

I had high hopes for the Upol 7061 Flexible High Density Body Filler (Flexible Bumper Filler) and used it on one of the cracks that I had V’d out.


The Upol does sand fairly easy, the problem was that it was too thick and therefore not flexible enough. The dried vinyl adjacent to the flexible bumper filler just cracked away. So I ground it out and used the TotalBoat’s FlexEpox, which did work quite well. But don’t throw away that tin of bumper filler as there is a use for it.

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[OldFatBald]

The flexible epoxy is good stuff but a little more difficult to work with as it has a pretty long setting time. It also stays somewhat viscous and moves around. I tried to level the surface as much as possible, but due to the shape of the dash I had to do it in two application.

The flexible epoxy is definitely more difficult to sand. I used a combination of a sanding block and my DA

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[OldFatBald]

After a couple of coats of the epoxy, I went back to the flexible bumper body filler which spread out very nice.


At this point, if I was planning on covering the dash with either vinyl or leather, I would be done. But this dash is going to get textured using thinned down bed liner, so I will be doing a bit more prep work.

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[OldFatBald]

The dash insert trim thingy had some scratches so I hit it with some acetone, scuff pads and some sandpaper.

It will get epoxy primed, then base coat and cleared.

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[Raider L]

Has anyone ever tried to redo a dash by removing everything and start from scratch? Or is it, why go to the trouble. Just go get another dash from a yard and fix that one? I'm just curious if anyone had ever tried to redo a dash to restore it.

The idea comes from watching Motortrend network and all the custom shops doing all this hard work in rebuilding all these cars and trucks. They seem to be able to restore most anything from scratch, so why not a dash. You can get it out, work directly on it since it has a metal backing, and just a foam pad and then you could cover it in leather if you wanted. Not put one of those kinds you lay on top of you existing dash covers people use. If yours is bad enough that it needed to be completely restored, then what would you use and how would you do it so it looks like factory.


And since it's 2020 and not 1974 the materials are much more advanced, UV and all the other. You ought to be able to find something that would hold up longer than a factory pad did. Like years longer. And look nice the whole time. Or am I asking for too much? I mean, hell, you could use "memory foam" as the pad, ha, ha, ha.

 

[OldFatBald]

Has anyone ever tried to redo a dash by removing everything and start from scratch? Or is it, why go to the trouble. Just go get another dash from a yard and fix that one? I'm just curious if anyone had ever tried to redo a dash to restore it....Or am I asking for too much? I mean, hell, you could use "memory foam" as the pad, ha, ha, ha.

Anything can be reproduced, I know a metal guy that is a true artist and can make anything out of metal including our dashes. I would imagine that it would be thousands of dollars and not really cost effective for our trucks. My dash repair is less than $100

 

[OldFatBald]

I didn’t like the way the VIN window was turning out, so I made this little piece out of 1/8” acrylic that I had and use CA glue to install it. It is a much cleaner look now.

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[OldFatBald]

Decided that I wanted to epoxy primer first.

First I hit the dash with two coats of SEM’s Plastic Adhesion Promoter and let that flash off

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[OldFatBald]

I then used Upol’s Raptor bed liner reduced down with a little acetone. I added some Beige colorant to the bed liner. Had to hold the gun further away from the piece than I normally do to get the texture that I wanted. Next time I probably wouldn’t reduce the bed liner so much at first.

I am happy with the result.

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[OldFatBald]

After sleeping on it and looking at it the next day, I liked the texture but wasn’t happy with the color.

Luckily I had some SEM Saddle Tan colorant which was a darker brown than I had expected.

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[OldFatBald]

A little more Plastic Adhesion Promoter on the vents and colored them also.

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[Raider L]

Boy, that looks great. I realized that all these processes won't work at all on my dash because it's not vinyl like ya'll's. It's a metal form and a foam pad and vinyl glued together and then the foam and vinyl together is glued to the metal form. It may be then put into some kind of heated press to cure the glue because it's the vinyl pad and foam that holds the shape of all the parts of the dash. I kept looking at what a good job you OldFatBald have done and then it dawned on me "wait a minute, my dash is metal not vinyl. I would have to either cover the cracks and splits up with a cover or strip it and try something else entirely different. Oh well.

 

[DanMcG]

Looks great, do ya have any closeups of the texture?