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Body filler, primer, and bed liner later... we have a firewall pad.










The most time consuming part was having to seal all the edges or anywhere the foam core was exposed with water down white glue. Why you may ask? Most paint solvents and propellants instantly dissolve foam. Try spray painting a piece of Styrofoam and you'll understand. So I'm my youth when I did a lot of scale model building, I learned that coating the exposed foam in watered down white glue seals the foam and protects it from the solvents.

That turned out great! Nice use of foam board, and good to know about sealing the edges.

Thanks! Also, if you need large pieces of foam board, more than is usually found at the local craft store, go to their framing department. I went to the local Micheals framing department and they get their foam board in 48x96 sheets. They will cut you a piece from that. I bought a 40 x 32 piece for about $5 and some change. Add in a $10 can of bed liner and a couple bucks with of body filler and I am pretty sure I have less than $25 into this. Vs $300-$400 for a reproduction one that wouldn't find my firewall anyway.

Got the windshield back in. Starting to look like a car again. Used EPMD rubber seal to replace the original tarpaper seal.







Also added the jute to back of the KevCo firewall pad.




And installed, after snaking the wiring and gauge tubes through it. Which is a bit of a challenge as everything had to come to far passenger side to clear the Jag motor and reach all the hook up locations which are on the opposite side compared to Packard Motor.

Also, ventilator is back in as well.

I'm lucky to have access to piles of used foamcore from my business. I've used it for underhood insulation on past projects, and door panel sound deadening. Coated it with bedliner, let it dry, coated one side with rubber cement, applied to the inside surface of the door skin. Doors that used to close with a "KANG!" sound suddenly just went, "ka-chunk".

The last bits of original wiring that was never replaced was last couple inches for ever light socket. Over the last couple days as I've been putting the dash back together, I noticed that the wiring has basically lost all its original cloth insulation where it enters each socket base in the dash gauge lights. So time to replace those. But instead of replacing the sockets, all you need to do is run new wiring and replace the little contact button inside the socket.

These little doo-dads crimp onto the new wire. Add a drop of solder if you like and the you can reuse all the original sockets, springs and insulators.




I didn't get a picture. But the original contacts on the 37 sockets are just solder pads, and soldered into the top of bakalite insulator. A hot soldering iron will melt the solder and allow you to pull the old wire out.

Then drill out the insulator slightly to fit the new button.

The contact buttons are all pretty much the same size, so these will also work for fixing tail, brake and parking light sockets.

So I'll also replace the ones on my taillights.

$10 on Amazon for a lifetime supply of these contacts.

I am a new member and a new 115C owner also. My is modified also. I am interested in seeing what you are doing. Any updates?

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Keep checking back here I usually post updates several times a week.

Center dash back together.







Also, just a note/observation:

Packard used copious amounts of undersized 10-32 nuts on the back of the dash. So think of a nut for an 8-32, but with a 10-32 hole. Most places it doesn't matter if you use regular 10-32 ones, except for mounting the ignition switch. The mounting studs are so close to the body of the switch that while you can spin the standard nuts on my hand, you absolutely can not get a socket over them to tighten the nuts down. And because of where it is, a wrench isn't going to happen.