There’s no harm in adding a ground to the cluster, as you did. I did on mine, also.
I also had a smoke issue occur once. Turned out I had a wire to my Stewart Warner temp gauge mounted to the bottom of the dash not fully insulated. It kissed the steel dash and caused some smoke.
I’m fairly certain mine is body color. You can see the original body color under the flap. I also attached a pic of the original outside body color I found under the left turn signal indicator on the fender for comparison…
Yes sir. Used to be black but prior owner painted over them. To be factual, Bob, mine is a ‘66. Before this, I had a ‘64 and I remember them being black. (For this photo, I propped the right flap open just for reference.)
I didn't watch the Cup race, but I did watch the last half of the Xfiniti race. This Kiwi from New Zealand, SVG, finished third in the race. It's only his fourth race on a NASCAR oval. He finished 12th last week at Daytona. He won the NASCAR Cup race with the big boys in his first ever...
My '66 already had an adjustable rod from the factory. During the conversion, I fine tuned the length, did not require a replacement. (FWIW, my car came with power brakes. I kept it power.)