I was replacing the foam and dash vinyl when I realized that the squiggles on the metal were letters in cursive writing. This is just to the left of the instrument area.
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It looks to me like someone in the factory signed the car. Was that at all common? When I put the new foam on, I tried to glue around the letters.

Must have been Fritz at it again

being a carpenter, I have signed quite a bit of my work over the years

Yeah. I have done pretty extensive work on our house built in 1921. It can be like seeing ghosts when you find writing or long forgotten styles of wallpaper.

Anyone ever found this on a 914 though. My search wasn't very productive.

Both my 914 and Scirocco (same factory at the same time) had the paint colour written with the same cursive under the dash.

When I restored the six there were a few letters under the dash that I couldn’t figure out. Wasn’t sure if it was someone’s initials or what?
Matt

@worn

sure looks like a signed name.
h. elfemheim is what i think it maybe is after looking hard at it.

i have my old left hand drive dash but the foam + vinyl is still intact in that area and i don't really want to peel it all off.

i have the usual crayon production number scrawled in red/brown crayon.
but some additional stuff as well.
there is "rot" written in cursive. meaning red.
its a blue sprayed dash frame that went into my car which is a phoenix red car.

and also the number "65".

different hand writing to that, though it is cursive.
all visible on the underside so obviously instructions for assembly line workers for installation.

no sure why you would sign your name in that location.
other than the old tradition that workers got uo to.
leaving their mark in hidden places.
if that is what it is its kinda nice. means they wanted to sign it.

a lot of the german tanks from world war 2 were signed by the workers in odd places.
along with the odd curse in russian if you were a slave laborer.

sure looks like a signed name.
h. elfemheim

Thanks for the interpretation

i have the usual crayon production number scrawled in red/brown crayon.
but some additional stuff as well.
there is "rot" written in cursive. meaning red.

Or a foreboding sense of the future. But then, I cut as much of it out as I could.
Wish that I had known the blokes, and that we all had more time.

I had the same on my 74. I think the word is Elfenbein - or elephant bone (ivory) in English. My dash (unlike the rest of the car) was painted ivory/off white.

Porsche color code 132 Elfenbein 1974 also known as Light Ivory

I'm reading it as Elfenbein as well. "h. elfenbein" to be exact.

Probably a Light Ivory (Hellelfenbein) dash ...

well done sir andy. good thing we have a resident german.

that agrees with and explains why my dash had "rot" written on it.
same as @worn 's

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Mine said the color of my car in German.

well. that sorts the color thing out.
random dashboards sometimes the color of the car sometimes not.
mine looks like it was sprayed metallic blue (dashboard) but the car it went in was phoenix red, so the "rot" makes sense. stick this dash in the red car heinrich.
......but.


additionally i have 65 written on there.
WTF is that? and its not 65th car of the day.

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and then after the VW production number (which says its not 65th car of day) is what looks like an A. Amerika? i dunno.

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Didn’t Laverne and Shirley put beer cans in the doors at the factory they worked at?

Hmmmm. Maybe this German stuff is paying off. The dash was painted ivory and installed in a silver car. They were close to the end of the model by the time the '76 was made in November of '75. Then they put on some tar/rubber sound deadener, glue foam and vinyl, so what difference did it make what color the dash was.
Do you think they wrote the color on the dash to indicate the name of the paint color for the whole car? What is the point of matching dash color to the car when you then write all over the dash paint?
Maybe someone knows, but the days are gone. Thanks folks.

My car was built as a 73 was Ivory White but the dash was Ravenna Green.

In those days they most likely "batched" parts on what they thought what orders would be in the paint booth.

The idea was that it wouldn't be seen so it didn't matter what paint was on the dash. They would paint all parts in for the chassis including any excess dash panels and paint them one color to same painting them separately since the dash was installed later to accommodate wiring and the dash components after painting.

Now days, a modern manufacturing line they can paint different colors on order. Porsche's factory in Zuffenhausen is quite the modern factory and I was lucky enough to see in back in 2018.

In a 914 it is quite common to have a different color dash.

i'm guessing they just painted batches of dash pressings with whatever was in the spray guns at the end of the day. blew the guns out to clean them and in german post war fashion put every drop of paint to use - reduced waste. then racked and stacked the pressings.

its possible that early on in production they were actually painting the dash pressing the matching body color and they may have even been doing a better job at actually painting them. dunno. never looked over very early cars.

by the time they got a few years down the track with production they rationalised and cost cut. its a pretty thin pass of blue metallic on my dash frame. and elsewhere in the car its a pretty thin pass of phoenix red in areas you can't see. ie up under front cowl where the fresh air fan box is and also up under the interior of the body where the dash itself fits.

the scrawl gets written on the dash by someone pulling them out of the racks and assigning them to cars for the day or the weeks production.

but i agree the notation of car color to the dash seems a bit redundant.
given its got the VW production number also written there with a build sheet to go with the number that already notes the cars color.

only thing i can think of is the person assigning the dash pressing to the build is doing a visual to make a judgement on whether the visible areas underneath don't constitute too big a color clash. maybe some dashes got painted a bit more fully on the underside than mine. like say if you had a lot of ravenna green paint on the dash underside in a red car might make a new owner raise an eyebrow if they happened to stick their head under there to change a fuse or something. and then there was a quality inspector who ok-ed the selections for the batches that had been pulled from the rack.

mine looks passable like its meant to be that way given that its basically mostly undercoat color on the underside. for some reason they painted to the top areas under the vinyl more fully. possibly in anticipation of condensation in the foam under vinyl or if the car got rained on with the top off and moisture penetrated the joint between the two top vinyl parts of dash? dunno. of course on top of that they shot or brush painted the areas with knobs etc black.

i'm guessing all the crayon notation go written on that painted raw dash pressing that got pulled off a shelf before anything else happened. and that the dash likely went into the cars as either a near fully assembled item or maybe close to fully assembled.