Restoring a dash yourself is possible, but it takes a lot of time/effort and specialized materials, and working with plastic can be a beast. I used everything from a company called Polyvance, and their website has some good restoration guides. I should say I used everything but their overpriced plastic welding iron. You can get one on Amazon for about $30 that works great. Their plastic filler rod (the stuff you melt into the repair) is far superior to generic stuff and worth the money. If you go this route do also shell out the money for their dash filler adhesion promoter (can’t remember the exact name). It sounds like one of those extras that you don’t really need (and Polyvance itself says is optional) but I find it’s actually essential to get a good repair. Getting the dash off is itself a big undertaking, and then you have to be prepare for a world of “well, while I’m in there . . .”
Your dash looks pretty rough, but you end up needing to spread the repair pretty wide even if you just have one crack, so it might not make much of a difference. And it looks like it’s mostly on the flat-ish part on top, which is much easier than all the curvy bits. A lot of the difficulty is because you’re repairing two layers, vinyl over foam padding. And you need a really sturdy repair otherwise the heat will just expand out the foam and crack it again. All in all it was a huge outlay of effort, but the dash ended up beautiful. And I’ve actually ended up using all the plastic repair tools and materials for all sorts of projects.
NPD just recently started offering a reproduction full dash. They say it also fits 78-81 but the radio area is a little different than OEM. The dashes are not cheap, but what is? I haven’t heard any feedback on the repops as they just came on the market — I’d be interested to hear if anyone has tried them. Interestingly, NPD sells them in “grades.”
I looked into dash covers and concluded they could look “good,” but would never satisfy my own OCD. Also I don’t know how well the covers work over uneven/lumpy cracks, but I would expect it would be even harder to get them laying flat and clean.
