Wood Dash

Sometime back in this car's history, the leather center dash was removed along with about 3/8" of the original birch ply backing and in its place a mahogany face was glued to the remaining plywood behind. Aside from the facts that it was not original, not attractive wood, and the new holes cut through the mahogany were not centered on the gauges behind, it was pretty good. So I scrapped all that stuff and carved an entire new face out of Baltic Birch ply. It was a bit of a challenge since the old dash was so buggered and since the holes were not properly located, and the metal backing plate that you can see in the background that I took all of the measurements off of was also filed out to fit the misplaced gauges. In other words, the old wood dash had misplaced holes drilled into it and rather than start over with a new piece of wood, the backing plate was filed out to fit the poorly made wood face. You can't make this stuff up. Usually the holes in the backing plate were enlarged in one direction only and I was able to get enough dimensions off of the undamaged side to draw the correct pattern. Then you get out the router and a few bits and go to town. The last shot is a little hard to see, but that shows the new wood dash located on the aluminum dash panel. Eventually this all gets covered with leather.