My old faithful '86 4X4 truck has 350,000 miles on it. It has lived a hard life, always out in western states sun, never sheltered. The dashboard was hideous. I'm good with anything mechanical or electrical but anything that has an artistic component to it, forget it, and rebuilding this dashboard involved a lot of curves and such that weren't straight forward mechanical work.
The first thing I did was completely removed all the material from the "well" because I wanted that area deeper and with a sharper shoulder than the way it came. I covered the holes in the well with fiberglass from underneath and those patches worked fine to hold in the resin I covered it with. Then I cut back the material from every crack so that filler would have a larger area to bond to. I filled in the cut back cracks and every place that the contours weren't correct and filled all those spots with Bondo. It took a number of tries before everything was filled and the contours were close enough to what I wanted. The huge issue now was strength. I racked my brain for a way to put back in the strength. I was going to glass it but that is a LOT of contour changes to attempt fiberglass. I finally decided I would coat it in fiberglass resin with no cloth and MAN did that turn out to be a good decision. The stuff painted on with a brush beautifully and self leveled




. On the second coat I waited until the resin was starting to flash, the moved it around a bit with my brush to get the texture. After two coats of resin it was shocking how strong it was. I no longer feared any kind of separation where the Bondo patches were. All of this involved a LOT of sanding and eyeballing, something I'm not good at but it is decent looking, the well is way deeper and more useful than before, and I am real happy with the way it came out.

 

good job!