Hello all,
What a great find, I have learned more here about customizing interiors in the last hour browsing than I have in a lifetime of looking elsewhere.
Just a quickie, I have looked at your four sticky threads which give great examples of some amazing mods, but the step I seem unclear on is the last.
I always assumed that when you re-do a dash pad, you have to use that special vinyl that you glue and shrink on with a heat gun. But all the examples here (so far) seem to have painting as the final finish after reworking and sanding. Is this the norm? It looks like a pretty nice finish. If it is only paint, how have you all achieved that nice factory dash look, I always imagined paint on fiberglass would look like a front fender for a dash pad?
I will be picking up an old 1992 Nissan GQ Patrol soon as I sell my bike. They have the single most ugly interiors that I have ever seen.
The layout is practical but ugly, hard to see in the pic but vents and so on are at the top, you can hardly get to the radio etc.
I am going to have a go at a complete remodel and will post pics as I go.
Looks like a great forum here, going to learne heaps.
Cheers
Ray
Welcome Ray.
There's multiple directions you can go with something like this. I'll list them below in order of potential difficulty
1) Vinyl/plastic spray dye. Once the factory dash is prepped correctly you can just spray this stuff on, let dry and have a different color factory interior.
http://www.duplicolor.com/products/vinylFabricCoating/
2) Re-wrap the interior in the fabric of your choice. However with alot of the older style dash's such as the one you posted those tend to be pretty difficult to wrap with all the hard 90 degree angles, etc. But it can be done with the right products and alot of patience.
3) Custom fiberglass the dash/interior. This sounds like the option you're wondering about if I read that correctly. This takes a bit more skill/time/precision but is a very effective way of getting a nice smooth glass like appearance after paint is applied. Also, fiberglass gives you the ability to make custom shapes or an entirely different dash setup than is factory if you're adventurous enough.
For example, here is the custom gauge bezel I made for my old cav:
as compared to the stock bezel:
Hope some of that helped. Feel free to ask more questions if I haven't quite hit what it is you're looking for.
Thanks JO3Y
It was more the dash pad itself I was wondering about. Where the vents and radio and so on go, the shiny painted look would be fine, but I notice in one of the examples in the sticky threads, the dash top itself had been filled and sanded. But in the final photos it seemed to look like a covered dash-pad, not a shiny front like the one you remodeled.
But I wasn't sure how that look was achieved. The photo's go from sanded pad directly to final fit. I have heard about a special vinyl that you apply with glue and a heat gun. It apparently shrinks and bends in response to the heat, and can cling in around those grooves and corners without folding. I wasn't sure if the final dash top / pad had been reupholstered or just painted. It does look good though.
hey you should check out rvinyl they have tons of differnt looks you can choose form and you cam get samples of it and thats sounds like the vinyl your talking about but check them out.
Yeah welcome to the .org - one of the best places on the internet!
Keep us posted on your progress.
