4/30/04
Dashboard III

I’ve been secretly stockpiling a couple entries to post to the website because I’ve got to work at my day job for the next few weeks! I’m only telling you this because I don’t want anyone who knows me, specifically my bosses, to think I’m playing hooky to work on my car! My “Ferrari Fridays” may be a thing of the past, but hopefully with the house, I’ll be able to do more work on the car up there!

I started the day by making the foam knee pads that attach to the bottom of the dash. It’s a big improvement over the dry rotted foam that’s hard and crumbly.

These pieces were made much like the dash pad using layers of a harder foam, gluing them together, and shaping it with a disc sander. The layers of foam helped me keep everything level with even thickness all the way across.

I cut the leather to cover all the pieces after I wrapped the two knee pads with a thin foam cover. This foam cover will hide the layers of foam underneath, and give the pad an additional layer of softness. I didn’t get to cover these pieces today because I was busy with the dash. I’ll have to save this part for next time.

Frank stitched the cover for the dash, so I was able to begin its fitting. The stitch line was carefully marked, and sewn to follow the contour of the foam dash I formed. Although it looks like a straight line when you look at it from the passenger seat, it has slight curve to it when stitched on a machine. Getting this right takes experience, and luckily, I had Frank’s to help lay it out! It’s also tricky to use one piece of leather for this dash, as both end pieces need stitching, while the center section only gets glued to the dash. The previous upholsterer used four pieces of leather to make this dash, and tried to hide the cuts along the defroster vents. When I put this dash back on the car, I’ll know we did it right with one piece of leather, as Pininfarina intended!

The top stitch that was sewn lays just below the front edge (facing the passengers) of the dash, so we had to constantly check to see that it was positioned correctly. As we stretched the leather onto the dash, we also had to make sure everything looked straight. Sometimes, a certain area had to be cheated so it would look correct to the eye, but might not be 100% correct to the dash.

After a lot of eyeballing, and repositioning, we finally got the right side of the dash into place where we were both happy with the results. I almost can’t believe how good it looks, and the lethah, it’s like buttah!

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