Interior Repairs Dash Instruments

Normally the instruments will fail from age, but this vehicle only has 87,000+ miles on it.

And most of the time the RV was in a temperate climate. Some of the plastic has degraded and there is minor corrosion on the metal casings. The reason that the instruments have stopped working is corrosion. All the copper traces have a thick black coating this stops the contacts for the connectors or the light sockets from making the proper contact and rendering the gage or light inoperable.

Before cleaning the corrosion from the traces and connectors

The surface corrosion is superficial.

To clean the corrosion from the traces I used a exacto knife,  1000 girt sand paper and a jewelers file, time consuming but cheaper than a new gage.

All cleaned up and ready to put back in the dash.

The outer ring needs to be removed to get inside and clean off the fog that has developed over the drive select letters, have to be careful to not crack the plastic lens and to use a non abrasive cleaner, such as a high quality plastic polish.

When I opened the speedometer the lettering for the drive select has deteriorated so bad it was flaking off, this was the cause of some of the fogging on the plastic lens.

After, two shots. This shot is with out a flash, you can see my attempt at repairing the lettering for the drive select. While I had the instrument apart I used some plastic polish and a dermel tool to clean up the scratches in the lens. There are two deep scratches (not noticeable in the images) that I could not polish out.

This shot shows the cleaned up speedometer. The flash causes the lens to look like it is foggy again but that is just the reflection.

There are two scratches to the left of the 100 mph mark that would not polish out.

Over all I very pleased with the finished product. How ever I did not get all the corrosion off of the exterior of the case.

Now to put it back in and test the lights.

The Fuel, Temperature, and oil gage interment cluster lens was cleaned and the copper traces were cleaned. It did not require this level of restoration.