I have a 70 bee and never liked the woodgrain dash. To me, it doesn't fit with the low buck theme. Mine had turned a greenish hue and was scratched in several places and I'm way to cheap to spend 5-600 on repro woodgrain. Plus I like how the black dash looks.

So, I removed the woodgrain panels from the "normal" dash pieces. I then mixed up some cracked dash pieces with acetone and used this mixture to fill in the holes that were used to mount the woodgrain pieces. Sanded and added the mottled texture and think they came out pretty good. You can tell where the holes were if you really look but I think it looks much better than the woodgrain.

I also think the black looks better. I actually prefer the earlier "striped" black ones but we can't use those because the earlier cars had the hazzard switch on the dash. I used the woodgrain because I wanted my car to be correct appearing but it would have saved $650.00 to just go black....the thought did occur to me

FWIW, the PG classics black bezels don't have the tabs for the woodgrain cut out, so it would be really easy to omit the woodgrain using those plus you would get the chrome strip on the edges.

Anyhow, looks good.


Dave

I used a combo of a razor and a dremel diamond tip bit shown below. It was hard to do, it looks better than I thought it would. A few time I cut too deep and had to start over. Once I was satisfied I sprayed a coat of primer. Then i sprayed a coat of rustoleum flat black texture paint, this helped to blend everything together. then I applied a few coats of sem landau black.

Here is a pic of the gauge cluster. Filled 7 or 8 holes in this one. I'm going for a blackout theme with the interior which is why I left the edges black and not chrome.

one more pic, this one also shows my "stealth" voltmeter.

Also, a thanks to Scott Smith for the acetone mixture idea and RoadRunner for his spare, cracked dash pieces to make the mix.

I used acetone to melt old dash piecs and applied the mixture slightly proud of the face of the dash. It takes a couple of days to harden. I carefully sanded the repair so that it was even with the top of the texture, if you sand to much you get a big flat spot. Then I used the razor and dremel to basically router the filled spots trying to match the texture width and depth. I thought of using some plaster or silicone to make a mold of the existing texture and use that over the repair but never got around to trying. I would get to a point where I thought it looked good the primed and texture painted. If it didn't look good then retry, in some casses added more "filler" and let harden. All in all probably a couple of nights to do each piece and be happy with it.

thanks