Why reproduction parts are usually not so great or never developed in the first place

That’s easy. It will get more expensive with tariffs so no time like the present to buy it!

1 Like

That was a great read! And just wow… what in incredible amount of vision, hard work and dedication on this project. now just look at the result of it all. Congrats to you and all involved, and THANK YOU for addressing an issue that is (was now), really one of the worst things about these cars. now not just replaced, but better than ever before.

1 Like

Even though I sold my 68 Cougar XR7 many moons ago, this makes me want to run out and buy a repro dash, just in case there’s another Cougar in my future,

1 Like

Hey Bill, I really appreciate your attention to detail and your persistence. Just about anyone else would have thrown in the towel long ago. It was also a really interesting, and almost painful read.

1 Like

I’m starting to get some feed back and one interesting thing is that the long OEM bracket for the passenger side panel seems to have some variability. In at least one case it was a tight fit. It still went into place but it took a little pressure to get it to go over the alignment pins. One other thing is that if your dash uses the individual brackets the one behind the oil pressure gauge is held in place by the oil pressure gauge. This will become self evident when you install the gauge in the panel.

All of this is helpful as I refine the instructions. Don will be producing video instructions that will be better than anything we can put on paper.

2 Likes

Excellent work and excellent read! I retired from a tier 1 auto supplier and we had 3-4 plastic injection molding suppliers and one of them supplied the chrome plastic parts. Was always amazed at how much tooling went in to even the smallest and simplest of parts let alone a part with this much detail. I gots to find me a 68 now :smiley:

1 Like

Don has a new video about restoring the gauge trim

Another great video

1 Like

mopauly1965
Funny story about when Boeing migrated the 747 drawings in to CAD. The airplane was not straight, the fuselage was curved in CAD, It took hundreds of line drawings to build that airplane. It had never been proven that the drawings lined up. But the craftsman building knew how to build it even with the misalignments in the drawings. Remember that airplane was designed in the mid to late 1960s.

3 Likes

I was told that exact story by a Boeing engineer while sitting in a 747. He said that they couldn’t believe that it was true until they talked to the guys who were actually building the planes. They knew about the problem and reported it years before. I think he said that the left side was shorter than the right.

In product development one lesson is that you can’t have line on line fits. And everything has a tolerance. The next thing you learn is that you absolutely can’t allow the tolerance to always stack up in one direction. Boeing broke rule number two

2 Likes

Thanks for all the hard work. Good to see all the advances in stereo lithography from when we started playing with it in 1989. I guess there is probably not going to be right hand drive version.

Thanks Leon! The nature of the beast is that it doesn’t lend it self to right hand drive. We would have to tool both sides from the ground up. It would be less expensive and faster because we would mirror everything to start. Is there actually a market for that?

I forget how many cuts it took to make the one in my 68. Think it had to be sectioned into about seven or eight parts, plastic welded back together and then re-plated. Luckily the guy that did the conversion had a converted dash frame from a RHD Mustang that we could use for a jig