It’s incredible how long a seemingly straightforward task can take, especially when you are looking to do it right. An example being one of our current customer projects which is the interior restoration of a 1969 1750 GTV. The car was wearing it’s original interior and the original dashboard was riddled with cracks and warpage from decades of use and being parked under direct sunlight. We choose to completely replace the dashboard with a high quality replacement from our friends at Centerline Alfa since previous experience having original dashboards re-covered have yielded poor results. There is always a level of uncertainty when it comes to ordering replacement parts for a vintage Alfa. Alfa Romeo stopped making replacement parts for the 115 series a long time ago so we are left with limited availability of quality replacement parts. When the dashboard arrived I was pleasantly surprised with the quality, the shape was very true to original as was the finish and fit of the entire piece. We got most of the way through the dashboard swap which involves swapping gauges, installing veneer, swapping over all the various hardware, badges, trim, switches and of course all the cleanup, thread chasing, etc. Finally the task of swapping the dashboard glovebox was due and it is where we came across the first major fitment problem….the built-in tabs on the new dash came no where close to aligning with the original glovebox bucket. Furthermore the contour of the original glovebox bucket (which you have to re-use) was just different enough from the new dash to necessitate some significant modifications and fabrication work. Nobody would otherwise know that DV Mechanics spent about 10 hours custom fitting a glovebox to a dashboard because we wanted it to look original…….mission accomplished.
