Greetings all,
Work and planning is underway to bring back my recently rescued ‘64 Barracuda. The car was originally a 273 and a pushbutton AT but now has a couple of wide open spaces where they use to live. The plan is to run a newer (post 1967) 225 and 904 as cheap replacements. Obviously, a newer 904 mean goodbye pushbuttons and hello floor shifter. I know they are (were) cables being made to adapt the buttons to the newer 904s, but that is just not in the budget. My concern is I have not been able to locate the switch bezel (to the left of the steering wheel; on the dash) that is blank (where the shifter pushbuttons would have lived) for the manual transmission models. I see reproductions and good used bezel WITH pushbuttons all over the place, but I have been on the lookout for a “blank” bezel for a few months now and found zip. I can just grind down the areas on the raised areas around the buttons and park lever on the pushbutton bezel I have now with a dremel tool then cut out a thin piece of ABS plastic sheeting with a pebble textured surface, glue it over the pushbutton area, and paint the whole thing with chrome paint if I have to, but I would like to run down the correct cover if they are still reasonably priced. Now, back in the late 1980-early 1990s when I was a dumb teenager and ‘64 Valiants were not an uncommon discovery in junkyards, I used to see 3 speed ‘64 Valiants with these bezels regularly. Nobody had any use for them back then and I am sure I could have grabbed all I could find back then for somewhere between free and a few dollars! But, those days are long past and so now, are these bezels a rare item or am I just out of luck in searching so far? How much is reasonable to pay for a decent used one; probably with bad chrome plate on the plastic, since that’s just the way the used dash covers are these days?
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