Fiberglassing Dash

I drive a 2001 Eclipse and Ive painted my interior various colors. Unfortunately, when you mix enamel and acrylic, the paint tends to bubble in heat, and I found that out the hard way. In the Eclipse the part of the dash that covers the gauges... I have 2 of those things. I plan on fiberglassing one of them, so I can just sand down the fiberglass real smooth then re-paint. I'll let you know how it goes.

BTW, do you know how hard or easy it is to sand fiberglass?

Fiberglass isn't the easiest thing in the world to sand.  I would suggest starting with a D/A (dual action) sander with about 36 grit...real rough.  Then once you get it shaped, you can start with your bondo and working up to about 150 grit.  You'll get the hand of it.  Once you think you've got it ready to prime and you put the first coat of primer on it, you're gonna notice all the little imperfections in it.  It'll take a while to get it perfect but keep sanding and bondoing then put a few coats of filler primer on it and sand it with some high grit paper then start wet sanding and you'll soon be ready to paint.

    A valuable tip is to wear long sleeves, pants and gloves when sanding because fiberglass dust doesn't play when it gets in your skin...it sux.

Hey, did you every think about making the dash look totally custom? I have a 89 Civic, and what I did with my dash was wrapped the thing in fleece. This made it look like an entirely different dash. It takes a little bit of time to wrape it, but once you have, you'll have line that no one else will have. Theres a link to mine.

http://groups.msn.com/Hersheylocsgroup/car.msnw?action=ShowPhoto&PhotoID=332

After I resined the fleece, I added one layer of mat. The fleece was pretty thick, so it was tough. The only thing with really thick fleece is that it doesn't soak all the way through in some spots, unless you put tonnes of resin, which can get costly. I would suggest goin and getting some Tshirt material. My friend and I got some at a Fanny's Fabric store for like $3 a yard. It was kinda like white muscle shirt material. Stretchy both ways. Resin that, then mat it until you think its solid enough. I put a final layer of resin alone all over, just to fill in some pits, so the bondo part of the project wouldn't take as long. I took a dremel and cut away any of the excess around the edges, to get clean edges.Then I put bondo all over, and sanded. The more bondo, and more sanding. The primed, wetsanded, and painted. Thats about all really. Most of the posts on this site are really helpful. Hope that helps too.

Oh one more thing. In my car, I found that there were like 20 different places where the dash was mounted. I reduced that to like 5 or 6. Its really not needed to have that many screws holding it in place. So know what of the mounts ur gonna use, so you dont glass them by accident. And getting it in is harder then getting it out! Trust me. I was up till 6 am figuring that one out.