After the dash pad and gauges were sent out I started cleaning up the wiring that needed to be reused. The Rallye light bar wiring, along with the "light group" wiring and all the radio/speaker wiring needed to be reused. I removed one secondary harness at a time....cleaned it and installed it on the new harness.
Once the main harness was assembled, I turned my attention to the individual dash components. I cleaned up the headlight/wiper/panel dimmer switches but the map light switch needed more work. It would no longer toggle and had caused a battery drain back when the car was still in service. I sent it to Jim at JS Restorations. He took it completely apart, and rebuilt the switch. He even kept the factory date code on the side of the housing.
The factory plastic MAP LIGHT bezel was broken and I didn't feel like trying to glue it back together. I found an older metal bezel off of a 70 Cuda. I sprayed the bezel with SEM Trim Black paint. Once that was dry, I used some Testors white model paint and painted the recessed letters. It doesn't matter if you get some excess paint on the face of the bezel. Once the white paint has dried for a few hours, just use some mineral spirits on an old T-shirt and remove the excess paint. The SEM paint is uneffected by the mineral sprits.
The heater bezel had seen better days. Some of the factory wrinkle paint was flaking off and the chrome rectangular border was worn in a few places. The white letters on the inside of the bezel no longer looked crisp.
It was a PITA removing the factory wrinkle paint to get down to bare plastic. I tried a few different methods but ended up soaking the bezel in brake fluid. That softened the paint enough so it could be scraped off. Once I was down to bare plastic, I sprayed the center rectangle with SEM trim black paint. I didn't mask anything off...I just sprayed the trim black onto the bezel. Once that was dry, I masked off the rectangular area for the wrinkle paint. Before stripping the factory paint off of the bezel, I sprayed a test of the VHT wrinkle paint since I'd never worked with it before. The test ended up looking just like the factory finish so I went ahead and painted the bezel. You need to do this out in the sun so the wrinkles get tighter. I you don't heat the part, you may not get an even finish.
I let the wrinkle paint dry for 3 weeks. Once I was satisfied that it was dry, I masked off everything except the raised rectangle border around the heater controles. I sprayed that border with two light mist coats of chrome spray paint. It's not as shiny as the factory finish but it looks good. Finally, I used a fine paint pen to repaint the letters on the inside of the bezel. After going over the letter once, they still looked dull and dirty. I had to go over them a second time in order for them to look crisp.
The radio fader knob and bezel are NOS pieces that my dad bought a long time ago.
The bezel around the AM radio was also sprayed with the VHT wrinkle paint. The faceplate of the radio itself was sprayed with SEM trim black and the raised border was sprayed with the chrome paint.