2006 Interior Trim Upgrade

[ronmanfredi]

We recently purchased our second Avanti after attending the AOAI meet this year.  This one is a 2006 model, #11, sits on a Mustang chassis with 100,000 well taken care of miles on it from the original owner.  He had a Sirus controller added, which I didn’t care for and some of the OEM applied woodgrain finish was chipping off in various locations.  I decided to remove the Sirus controller and cover the woodgrain surfaces with Black Carbon Fiber.  The car is Red, with a Red and Black interior and the woodgrain finish didn’t match it in my opinion, so we went with Black CF.  I purchased the Avery semi-Gloss Black 3.5 mil Carbon Fiber off Amazon after reading the reviews of several manufacture’s products.

Disassembly:  After removing the A/C vents and sliding the console back, the dash panel literally just fell off.  It had been removed previously to install the Sirus unit and they couldn’t get it to stick back in place, so they put some gobs of silicon in places and reinstalled it.  (that didn’t hold either).  The wood grain dash panel was warped badly as well.  So, step one was to remove all the old OEM white foam sticky tape and silicon gobs from the fiberglass dash and wood grain panel.  Then I used a heat gun with physical pressure to straighten out the dash panel as much as possible while removing the Sirus unit and wiring.  The next surprise was the fact that the radio and A/C controls had spacers behind their mounting screws to hold them in the correct position since the fiberglass dash wasn’t made correctly.  I removed all the Sirus stuff and then reinstalled the Radio and A/C controls.  Now I wanted to check the fit of the dash panel before added the carbon fiber to it and discovered the next surprise, the dash itself wasn’t flat across the front.  The instrument cluster has a 1/4” thick rubber gasket that surrounds it.  It presses on the clear glass panel that is attached to the back of the dash panel with 2-sided tape.  Without any pressure on the gasket, the panel sits off the dash almost 3/8".  On top of that, the dash isn’t flat, it tapers outwards toward the edges.  There is no way the dash panel would sit flat and stay in place because of this. 

To resolve this issue, I added 3/16” and 1/4" plywood strips to the dash using small screws and adhesive.  This allowed the panel to sit flat on the dash after compressing the instrument cluster seal just a little.  Next was to wrap the dash panel, transmission console trim, door handle and window control trims.  The plastic silver steering wheel trim was scratched and scuffed badly (new is $268) so I decided to remove them, sand them down and wrap them as well.  Now I could install everything.  Using 3M 1/2" wide, double sided black trim tape, the dash panel installed easily and sat nice and flat on the dash.  Note, that I used 3M tape primer on the wood strip surfaces to ensure the tape would stick correctly.  We really like the end result and while CF may not be for everyone, we sure like it.

[Stacey]

You did an excellent job of face lifting the dash. Looks new again.