[HWYSTR455]

Originally Posted by Formulabruce

Before you put it in, please test fit a Radio bezel, under column piece, glove box door, AND your gauge bezel ( get a junk used one for this) And the Ash tray... that area needed a ton of cleaning out..
My buddy Allan has many DAYS of scraping out excess foam, re- glue the edges back down..
The al knoch dash also had a lot of foam at sides , had to really work it, AND the metal A pillar trim had to be forced a bunch..
Best to do it all before you even test fit it in car.
It does look great though

This.

Those are all the areas my 2 dashes had/have issues. My understanding is that there is a difference in the dash skeleton on diff year dashes, and there are minor differences in the bezels and pillar trim.

In my case, the pillar trim from the 79-81 cars fit better than other years, and I ended up with I believe 79 ones. I had a large selection of pillar trims, but know for a fact the ones I used were 79 because they were camel/tan and recall pulling them from a donor. Some of the ones I had when checking fit left a large gap, and others were very tight on the dash side. So know there's a diff.

On the bezels/inserts, the arch along the top is slightly different I believe. Some fit well, others were very tight. On the tight ones you have to put the lower edge in first, and then 'tip' the top edge into the dash.

Since I am using a single din 'radio' I ordered a repop bezel block off for a 79-81. It was a very tight fit. Not sure if the repop ones are accurate so it may just have been an issue with that part, but heating the area helped.

My ashtray same thing but the opposite, the opening is larger than the repop ashtray. Not sure if it's the ashtray or the opening itself. This is the same situation with the glovebox door.

It may not be as bad as I'm saying, it may just be I'm picky, but that's my experience with recovered dash pads. My take may not be accurate, but that's what it all appears like to me.

It's still better than having a cracked up, warped, or chunked out dash tho. And this is the reason in my case I chose a 2NDs dash in the one car. My stuff are all drivers anyway.



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