Dash restore with an update Options

[ConeDodger]

Today I got a bunch done on my dash restoration. As some of you may recall, my car found a boulder in the road at WCR which caused about $7K worth of damage. The car spent 2.5 months at Yeaman Autobody in Palo Alto which is about 100 miles away from me but the trouble getting it there and back were well worth the effort. Scott Yeaman loves 914's and I think treats each one as if it were his own.

When Scott was straightening the unibody, the windshield cracked. This was ok with me since mine had wiper gouging and I had a new Sigla sitting in the garage for a project down the road a piece. I guess we are now down that road...

My project today was to remove the existing dash vinyl and prepare the surface and install new Appearance and Performance vinyl and pad. James and Heidi of Appearance and Performance can be found in our Member Vendor section as well as online at their own website.

In addition to this simple restoration, I planned a little bit of an update. You Concours Weenies had better stop reading now and click back. I installed a Blaupunkt St. Louis some time back as well as Appearance and Performance speaker pods and passenger footwell subwoofer box. The sub box got a JL Audio 8" sub with it's own amp while the speaker pods got Polk Audio MOMO component speakers. By themselves, the sub and 6.5" speakers sounded great but as I said, these were component speakers so there were some tweeters that did not get installed. They went in today... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

As I said, first I removed the old vinyl which was very easy. It just pulled right up. Unfortunately, this was not true of the pad that goes under the vinyl. For this I took my cordless drill with a wire wheel bit and 'dug' up the pad and cleaned the sub dash down to the paint. Once stripped, I drilled a couple holes on each side for the tweeters. One hole mounts the cup the 'eyeball' tweeter goes into, the other hole is for the wires. Once the holes were drilled, I went about the task of masking off the body and the dash that I didn't want to get contact cement on. With that done, on to the contact cement. First the dash, then the bottom of the pad. When it had dried to tacky I applied the pad to the dash. This is easiest with the dash pad out since the Appearance and Performance vinyl kit comes untrimmed. With the dash off, you just install and trim later. If the dash pad were on, you would be getting contact cement all over your dash pad. YUCK!!! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)
Once the pad was on, I painted it with contact cement and then went on to the bottom of the vinyl itself. With this done, I located the holes I had previously drilled and installed the tweeters.

Now, all that's left is to reinstall the windshield and dash pad.