Repair a ’69-’70 Dashpanel

Our Project ’70 Mach 1 has now been dubbed “Silver Bullet” by Allan Shepley and staff at Mustang Central in Byron, Georgia, because of our choice of Pewter Silver for a body color—or because we are such pains, and he’d like to lay us flat with a slug of said material. In any case, we decided to be somewhat heroic and tackle the dashpanel ourselves, just to help out. This was one task that we thought would be an easy, greasy deal: a bit of paint, some duct tape, and poof, it would be finished and in the mailbag to Allan. Wrong.

The ’69-’70 Deluxe or Mach 1 dashpanel is a slick-looking piece. The teakwood-looking dashpanel and the nice interplay between black and minimalist chrome give the car a classy look. What it does to your wallet in a restoration is another matter. Point one: The lenses are not available as of yet; read on to see what fun that was. Point two: The sun can (and does) bleach out the teakwood panels. Point three: It goes without saying that the chroming of a piece this big will make you cry—especially when you have to cover up 98 percent of it. In this article, we’ll show you how we circumnavigated some of these pitfalls and fell head over heels into others.