Technical Round dash reconditioning

[Abarth 695]

Hi,

I am reconditioning my Giardiniera round dash similar to early 500s. I have the new housing etc but I can see that some of the metal light housing and other parts are rivetted to the plastic housing. How do you remove these and transfer them to the new plastic housing?

 

[the green vanper]

Hello,

I have nothing in common with restoration of old cars, but I'm a DIY guy and I will do as usual rivets: you have to cut the head off or drill through it, recondition them (soda blasting/etching? + galvanisation), then swap to the new plastic and use similar rivets to secure in place.

 

[the hobbler]

Hello,

I have nothing in common with restoration of old cars, but I'm a DIY guy and I will do as usual rivets: you have to cut the head off or drill through it, recondition them (soda blasting/etching? + galvanisation), then swap to the new plastic and use similar rivets to secure in place.

The problem will be finding rivets that match both in size and depth those that were used by the factory for the original build of the instrument cluster. As the "Green Vamper" has suggested, initially (very carefully) drill off the heads of the old rivets in order to take the original unit apart. You might find that you can then remove the body of the old rivets (once they have no 'head' to hold them in place) and then, using the old rivet the wrong way round as a 'correct-location' guide, glue the new parts that need to be transfered into the new unit. You might have to do a bit of "finger-walking" on your lap-top to find the correct glue to use, but it must exist. Let's face it, after Lotus had proved it feasible (with the Elise) just about ALL modern 'Supercar' chassis are glued together these days, rather that welded and/or rivetted---it is just amazing what glues are out there.

 

[Bigvtwin996]

I had similar issues fixing reflectors (not Fiat) into lighting backs once they had all been replated, normal rivets tend to hold by deforming the tubular part with the ball, often this puts so much pressure on the weaker parts in that the mounting cracks....
What I did was to buy some solid alluminium rivets and clean the hole so the rivet was a good fit (the wrong way round) then used a few drops of super glue and pushed the rivets through the base into the reflector body and used a small G clamp till it had gone off (to make tem look like the original die cast type rivet that was part of the original reflector, I drilled a small hole in the larger part and sort of opened that so it looked like the original... just because I like things to look right, but for the speedo you could just leave them flat headed...