Lower Dash Restoration – Part Deux…

I’ll get this off my chest right away. I’m not completely satisfied with how the lower dash is turning out:

It’s not actually as bad as it looks in the picture, but the paint didn’t apply evenly and there are some minor splotches and streaks that are visible – even after a few re-coats.

I keep telling myself that it’s a lot better than what I started with:

But it’s still not quite up to the standards I was hoping for. From everything I’ve read, the paint that I’m using (which is supposed to be the correct color for the dash) is supposed to apply very evenly and cleanly. In my case, it did just about everywhere but the dash. It’s not bad enough to re-do, so I’m going to chalk this up to “not everything can be perfect” and continue moving on.

 

Just getting to this point was wrought with complications this week. As I mentioned last week, I was concerned that media blasting the dash would remove some of the texturing that’s in the metal. To avoid that, I tried using a paint stripper.

This did not go as well as I hoped it would. After two coats, there was still a fair amount of paint in valleys between the texturing. Worse yet, the stripping of the paint revealed more underlying rust than I was expecting:

Lastly, the paint stripper – which I thought would be a rather immobile gel – was actually quite runny and flowed down into areas I had painted last week. In those non-textured areas, the stripper naturally worked really really well.

In the end, I was left with rather a mess that took about half an hour of hosing off, compressed-air drying and wiping to clean up.

I decided at that point that I was going to just take the 20 minutes to media blast the thing and try to “be careful.” Careful in this context meant to turn the air pressure in the media blaster down to about 75 psi (from the 100psi I usually use) and not dwelling too long on any one spot.

In the end, the texturing was preserved and the lower dash cleaned of all paint and rust – and about 1/3 of the paint I put on last week. At that point, it was just the typical prime/prime/prime/paint/paint/wash/rinse/repeat process that I usually follow with all of my other parts. I’m not sure what part of that process didn’t quite work out like normal, but c’est la vie.

Happily, the other parts of the restorations went really well.

The glove box door went from this:

To this:

The ash tray and lighter assembly went from this:

To this:

The ash tray and knob were nicely restored:

And the HVAC control unit went from this:

To This:

I have new knobs and a new faceplate that I will install after cleaning up all of the individual pieces.

I should have all the pieces parts all cleaned up and everything put back together next week.