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How to Finish a ’33-’34 Ford Dash Insert

Author

Josh Mishler

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When building a street rod, unless you are building it to look like the day it rolled off the showroom floor, you find yourself constantly hiding whatever you can, wherever you can. One area that usually ends up hiding more items than was ever intended is the dashboard.

The dash is the one area that lives up to the old saying, “10 pounds of stuff in a 5-pound bag,” which generally carries with it a whole set of challenges and/or problems. When it comes to the ’33-’34 Ford, conditions are worse than normal, as there’s practically no space behind or under the dash. By the time you place your gauges and an A/C unit, there is little room left for much else, including a glovebox. When your needs are such that you require a certain amount of equipment behind the dash, most of the time the answer to your dilemma is a smooth dash.

While this may be the solution to finding the space you need, it does not solve the problem of what to do when you have a traditional-looking hot rod, or you just don’t like the looks of a smooth dash in your vintage hot rod and would really like to retain the look of a ’33-’34 Ford dash. Well, there are answers, and a simple one lies in a new set of dash inserts and gauges that are available from Redneck Street Rods. The new inserts are finned aluminum and will easily mount to a smooth ’33-’34 Ford dash to create the look of dash with a glovebox door.

Using a smooth fiberglass dash panel, also available from Redneck Street Rods, we’ll walk you through the mockup of the new, finned aluminum dash inserts and gauges. In the end, what Redneck has come up with is the great looks of traditional finned aluminum, with the gauges in clear sight, along with the recognizable shape of the – ’33-’34 Ford dash. Here we show you just how simple and easy it is to transform a smooth dash into one fit for a traditional hot rod. AR

1. Here you see all the tools and items needed for this project. We have the Redneck Street Rods fiberglass dash, Sonny Mac Industries finned aluminum dash panels, an adjustable locking clamp, a tape measure, a yardstick, a 3-3/8-inch hole saw, a 2-1/8-inch hole saw, a drill, an awl and a small socket set.

2. Since we are dealing with panels that are finned aluminum, we want the fins to line up from one panel to the next. We measured up from the end to the center of the dash and scored a mark with an awl.

3. Once we scored a mark at each end, we aligned a yardstick with the marks and scored a line down the center of the dash.

4. Next we clamped the panel that accommodates the gauges on the driver’s side of the dash, centering the panel using our line, making sure that our scored line ran through the same fin on both ends.

5. Making sure that the clamp had a firm hold on the panel, we scored a line around the inside of each gauge within the panel.

6. Here you see what the dash should look like after we have scored our lines.

7. With our circles drawn where the gauges will go, we measured to find the center of the two largest gauges. In this case we were working with a 3-3/8-inch gauge, so our center was 1-11/16 inch. At the center we scored a mark.

8. Our drill was fitted with the 3-3/8-inch hole saw. We centered it on our center point and drilled out the hole.

9. Since the larger gauges have been cut out, we proceeded to find the centers of our four surrounding 2-1/8-inch gauges. Knowing that the gauge is 2-1/8 inch, we measured and marked our center 1-1/16-inch in from the edge of the scored circle.

10. This time our drill was fitted with the 2-1/8-inch hole saw. We centered the hole saw on our center point and drilled out the hole.

11. Looking at our panel with all of our holes cut out, it’s easy to see the way our dash is going to look.

12. Before mounting the gauges and their panel, we needed to mount our other two panels, seen here from the backside, with their studs and the nuts that come with them.