Do some research and determine which option and supplier is best for you, your car, your timetable and your budget. Or you could go with a reproduced dash pad already made, available from suppliers such as Bird Nest or Larry's Thunderbird Parts, and then assemble the pad to your car's dash panel frame yourself. You could have a company like Just Dashes custom-fabricate, color and assemble a new dash pad to your car's dash panel frame. But if it is at least somewhat helpful to someone, then I've done something to repay the VTCI and their forum-contributing members who helped me, with their thoughtful gifts of knowledge and experience. This chronicle and my experiences offered here certainly can't assure any sort of outcome for anyone else. But I could not find a collection of photos of the process, nor any sort of stepped hands-on play-by-play that might have made me more comfortable at the project start. The Vintage Thunderbird Club International forum was a most valuable resource with good posts and lots of important information left there by thoughtful and generous members who'd gone ahead and refurbished their dashes before me, and then took the time to write about it. I write all of this to be hopefully encouraging and helpful to the next person contemplating this project. That now well-weathered socket set is still my #1 go-to set today. One day a fellow drove in to the station, and out of the trunk of his car he was selling shiny new S&K socket wrench sets for just 5 bucks. How to tune them, fix their brakes, replace their water pumps, and budget repairs like wrapping soda pop cans around their exhaust pipes to cover the holes until I could afford better. I loved those cars and I was fortunate to find a job pumping gas at a local Marathon service station where Ron, the station owner and a kind man, taught me about the tools and processes to work on them. The Edsel was in wonderful condition, almost as new, but very affordable because few folks wanted Edsels in 1971. Later during my junior year of high school I bought a 1959 Edsel Ranger 4-door sedan. I was so excited by it, I bought it on the spot for $250 cash I'd saved from my dishwashing job without even driving it first. It was baby blue with a black top and its high style was beyond beautiful to this teenager. My first car when I was 16 in 1970 was a tired but rust-free 1956 Cadillac Series 62 convertible I found sitting out in a farmer's field one day while hitchhiking to work. The simplicity of my Thunderbird's layout helped to make its dashboard refurbishment a rather straightforward proposition. As far as I could tell, the dashboard hadn't been previously removed from my car. Notably my car does not have the swing-away steering wheel option, unusual as I've read that about 85% of all 1961 Thunderbirds do. I believe the only factory options in my car are the heater and the AM radio. My Thunderbird here is VIN 1Y71Z109655, data plate body 63A, color A, trim 56, date 01M, trans 4, axle F, which translates to a 1961 2-door hardtop "Bullet Bird" in Raven Black with black interior built December 1, 1960. If you are like me and you enjoy old cars, particularly Thunderbirds, and you don't mind taking on a project, then perhaps you too are thinking about swapping out that old cracked dash pad in your Thunderbird and generally refurbishing the dash panel. Old now because I drove cars like them when I was a kid in high school almost 50 years ago. (June, 2018) - I'm not a mechanic or an engineer or any sort of automotive service professional.
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