By this point, the dash had been sanded, hardened, and was mostly ready to get painted. But I decided to go over the top and just do a skim coat of Bondo anyway.
As always with Bondo, 99% of it ends up wasted. But I'm rather happy I tried it anyway. Look at those low spots that got filled in!
Of course, since I was happy, the universe decided something needed to go wrong. In this case, it was the primer. The rattle can decided to change from a mist to a stream a couple of times. Ugh.
I got most of it sanded down, then rattle canned the black on in a few light layers.
The final product would have been great... If it were on a vinyl surface, and not a vinyl and plastic bond and bondo and primer and...
The color was... Not what I was expecting. I totally could have gone with it if it looked decent, but it's WAY lighter than I expected:
After multiple attempts of sanding and respraying and the dash just getting ickier, I got frustrated. I tried to install it, just to test out the Bondo's cracking restraint. To my surprise, no bending was needed. It just slid straight in. Well hell... If I'm doing all this work for a crappy dash, why not just install the nice one?
First, make sure it's the right dash:
And that there's no odd metal placements that would block the GPS from working... Nope. Awesome. Let's toss the vents in:
