Westfield

Dashboard Rebuild: Before & After Photos
(click photos to enlarge)

This is how the dash looked when I bought the car. Note how far apart the speedometer and tachometer are situated. Also note the exposed screw heads and cheap vinyl covering.

And this is the new dashboard with the closer set gauges and screw heads hidden beneath the new leather facing. The color match between the leather and old vinyl is actually very close, but the photo conditions (natural light vs. flash) mask this fact.

The Construction Process

As I mentioned on the previous page, rather than create a new dash from scratch, I simply cut out the section ahead of the driver and grafted in a new piece of aluminum that positioned the gauges and warning lights where I wanted them. (the photo on the right shows this new piece riveted to the existing frame.) One of the toughest parts was figuring out how to cut the new holes for the speedo and tach without spending a fortune on 3-3/16" hole punches that I would never use again, or dropping $75 at my local machine shop. Since I have a small router table for my Dremel tool, I decided to

(click to enlarge)

set that up with a side cutting bit (looks like a drill bit, but the spiral grooves are sharpened to cut laterally) and saw, rather than bore the holes to the correct size. The first few times I tried this, the holes were very jagged and there was too much variation in diameter to firmly mount the gauges in place (the VDO's have a very, very thin lip, so the hole must be cut to an exact size) but I finally discovered that if I set the Dremel's speed to one of the lowest settings, then I had enough control to follow the pattern I had laid out with a compass. For the warning light holes, I found that a 1/2" spade bit worked best. Although these bits are not really recommended for aluminum, they work great and cut a very smooth hole without pulling up the edges like a standard drill bit.

Keeping the bolt heads hidden meant that I had to figure out a way to firmly attach those little guys to the dash so they wouldn't turn when I tighten the nuts that hold the whole dash assembly to the scuttle. I first toyed with gluing them in place, but I instead decided to fasten them to the aluminum with thin secondary nuts secured by loctite. The downside to this approach is that those nuts act as spacers and thus hold the aluminum frame off of the scuttle by ~1/8". Fortunately the leather is almost the same thickness, so when it is wrapped around the edge of the frame and everything is tightened down, it gives the appearance that there is indeed a flush fit between the scuttle and dashboard.

The biggest challenge though, was installing the gauges after I had attached the leather to the aluminum frame. In the factory installation, the vinyl over each gauge and switch hole features radial cuts from the center to the edge of the cutout. The resulting "triangles" of vinyl are then folded around the cutout and then glued to the back of the aluminum (if this doesn't make any sense, check out the photo). I had intended to do the same with the leather, but that material is quite a bit thicker and so by wrapping it around the edge of the hole, I was in effect shrinking the size of the cutout by over 1/8". This meant that my perfectly sized holes were now too small. To fix this, I still made the radial cuts in the leather and glued the little triangles in place as done by Westfield, but I then used a razor blade held at a 45 deg angle to the back of the dash to back cut the material around the circumference of the new holes. This technique created a gasket effect, wrapping the leather tightly around each gauge/switch, and thus forming a perfect fit.

This project took longer than I initially thought, but I am very pleased with the results. The only problem was a slight screw up that occurred when I mapped out the cutout for the steering column. My intent was to have the Speedo & Tach about 1/3" higher than they were in the stock set up, but somehow I messed up the measurements and placed them at exactly the same height as the old units. I didn't notice this error until I mounted the finished dash, so there was no way to fix it, but this is a pretty minor glitch.