Well, it's finally done! I've been working on a custom dash for my Midget on
and off most of the summer and I finally got it installed today. Pics are
here: http://www.mediarchive.com/~eddie/midget/ Pics 1 and 2 are about the
same. 3 is a slightly closer view. I'm going to put together a "how-to" for
anyone interested.
In a nutshell, I had a somewhat tattered padded dash and I wanted an older
style metal dash, but swapping out directly would have meant buying and
swapping steering columns and I didn't really want to do that. So I got a
second padded dash, stripped it, and spliced in a 9 inch section into the
center to give more room for switches and additional guages. I moved the
hazard switch stuff and lighter to this new section, along with a new
voltmeter and oil pressure guage. Put a new temp guage in place of the old
Smiths combo guage. Sprayed it with wrinkle paint (looked good with just
that) and engine turned a piece of stainless I picked up at Carlisle cheap
and overlaid the whole area with that. Made the crash pad out of 1 x 1/8
aluminum bar, a bunch of very stiff craft foam (like a soda can insulated
holder) and some vinyl. Vinyl's a bit dark - didn't quite match the Autumn
Leaf, but good enough.
Now before you give me a hard time about the cheapy AutoGage meters, those
are just there temporarily. I'm planning on getting some new Smiths guages
from Gower Oaks some time, probably a combo guage, a voltmeter, and a clock -
just to fill the extra hole ;-)
Eddie
1971 Midget
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