Ginger is the name of my favorite Magnum. Twenty years ago I had two beautiful black Magnums, Ginger and Maryann. I gave Maryann to my now 31-year-old son for his 15th birthday. Sadly for ten plus years, it has sat disassembled, waiting for my son to restore. But back to my story, I recently have been freshening up Ginger. I replaced the original leather seats with more comfortable modern leather seats.
Click Here for more information on the car’s freshening up.
Now I’m replacing the digital dash I put in the car about 17 years ago with some nice white faced custom gauges.
This is the current dash with 17 Year Old Dakota Dash gauges. It is for sale if you’re interested.
So I bought an empty gauge panel on eBay, and ordered about $1000 worth of custom gauges close to the size of the holes. I bought a large Speedometer (with Tach) that works off GPS; and a large gauge that has Volts, Oil Pressure, Coolant Temp and Fuel Level to fill the two big holes. To fill the two smaller holes I bought an Oil Temp gauge and a clock.
The two big gauge holes with the sleeves in them were too small by about 1/16″, so I had to cut the welds attaching the sleeves to the panel and pop them out. Once out, the holes were now 1/8″ too big. On the small gauge holes, I had to cut the inset hoods off as the gauges were too shallow for the screw on collars that attach the gauges to the panel to screw on the back of them.
To make the big gauges fit, I made some spacers from 4″ schedule 80 PVC sleeves, by hand sawing about 3/8″ off the end and wet sanding until they were smooth and the same size.
I mocked the gauges up to make sure they fit prior to doing any sanding and painting on the gauge panel. They did, so I glued the spacers onto the panel.
I wet sanded the panel and masked off the idiot lights.
After painting gloss black, it looked too gloss and cheesy. Some of the glue around the rings (that I swore I’d sanded all of the way off) was also showing.
So I decided to leave the coves glossy black, but have the flat portion in a hammer tone black – to tone down the gloss and hide imperfections. So I taped off the coves, sanded some more on the glue around the rings, and wet sanded the areas to get the hammer tone paint.
I hit it with two light coats with an hour between, and then a very wet coat after another hour.
This is where I’m at right now. I’m out of town until Tuesday, which is little more than 48 hours to cure. I’ll pull the tape off Tuesday, mount the gauges – and I’ll post some photos of the finished product.
