Fixing a mis shaped instrument binnacle

[FredBasset]

Folks, just thought I'd pass on my experiences in sorting out something that really irritated in my Excel. I'm doing a full interior rennovation, carpets are done, headlining almost complete and I'm nearing completion on the leather rennovation. Oh sorting out the electrics too to remove some truly awful bodges by previous owners around stereo and phone installations.

It's gone well although its taken a long time, nearly a year now although in mitigation I only get a couple of hours a week to work on it.

The one thing that irritated was the dash binnacle, above the heater controls the edge of the dash had turned up over a length of three inches or so. I've seen this "hump" on a number of other Excels and to my eyes at least it looks pretty horrible.

I've looked at it many times while its been out of the car and wondered what to do with it. The foam has come away from the metal frame of the dash and I had considered trying to glue and clamp it back together but was not sure this would be a long term repair as it looked like the foam was actually cut slightly too small originally, causing the problem.

Over Easter I found I had some time spare unexpectedly and as I'd not ordered the things I needed for the next job I decided to tackle this, stupidly I did not take any pictures but here's what I did.

1. Carefully removed the leather from the dash. It's in two pieces and is fairly easy to remove. It's generally only glued around the edges, there is a squashy foam glued to the top of the frame to give it a soft touch and the only area I had problems were where this had been glued. Just keep going and try not to remove too much of this soft stuff.

2. When the leather was off its clear that the deformation of the edge actually spans further than you can see, get a stanley knife and cut the edge of the dash off, about an inch either side of the distortion. You can use the metal frame as a guide and make sure that you make clean cuts. I had a section of the hard foam edge of the dash cut out about ten inches long.

3. I then would cut a section off this, about an inch long and shape the back of each one carefully using the stanley knife so that it could be glued back on to the metal frame and hard foam of the dash retaining the correct shape. I worked from both ends and came back to the middle. I used AF178 glue which I had laying around from the headlining and carpeting.

Once complete leave to dry for a day

4. Check that the foam has stuck back to the frame, I did this by picking the whole thing up holding each section that had been reglued in turn.

5. Mostly the shaping had worked but in a couple of places it was not possible to get the right shape so I used a file to do final shaping. This only took a couple of minutes as the hard foam padding of the dash is easy to work with.

6. Glue the leather back on. Obviously the dash is now a slightly different shape, I started from the bottom and lined up screw holes in the leather where the heater control panel is fixed as a guide for where to start.

The end result is pretty much perfect and I think that in total I spent less than four hours working on this. I'm happy to discuss if anyone wants to do this, just drop me a PM. If someone lives close enough I'll help and we can take pictures this time.

As for the rest of the interior, I'm taking next week off to finish it so hopefully will post some pics then:-)

Regards
Fred