Dash Replacement

Tried Heavy Truck Recycling yards or even Freightliner themselves?

 

Try Fitzgerald trucks in Crossville, TN. I know he has a lot of Freightshaker parts laying around.

 

Thats a pretty common thing on older Freightliners. As you discovered it's not easy on your wallet . I'm thinking its over 1000 dollars to redo it all. One good thing if you spend the money to do it right, you won't go blasting over RR tracks and such LOL Is this one of the parts where Freightliner parts are SOO much cheaper than Pete stuff? Sorry about that I get tired of hearing how Freightliner parts are all SOO much cheaper than Pete parts. All trucks makers have some parts that are reasonable and some that are priced crazily. Good luck

 

Yeah, I stopped at Peterbilt to buy a washer fluid nozzle. It was $11.00 for a tiny piece of plastic! But they have you over a barrel because so many parts are dealer items only.

 

The dash panels are not cheap, but they are not overly expensive for that matter either. I've personally replaced the entire dash in a '93 FLD120. The dash was cracked when I purchased the truck used, and it got destroyed by an abusive driver.

One thing you may try that I've had success with, is gluing the dash back together. Those Freightliner dashes are made of injection-molded thermoplastic structural foam. They can be glued back to like-new with special cements that are as strong as the plastic itself (if not stronger in many cases). I'll have to look up what the cements were that I used, but a dealer should be able to tell you. They may not want to since they won't make the parts sale on a new dash, but everything is spelled out in the workshop manuals.

No matter which route you take, keep power tools away from your dash in the future. Most of the damage that I've seen, and what you describe, stems from overtorqued fasteners--by lazy mechanics using drills and driver bits seeking a faster dis-assembly.

And for those of you that want to preach the benefits of a Peterbilt or PACCAR product, their dashes are made by Con-Met (Consolidated Metco) of the same material, with the same problems.

Let us know what you decide, and if you need the cement product ID. If you have the broken dash peices, cementing does work.

 

Roadhound I hear you on the sprayers. I always whine about those too. I buy two in the fall every year for 7 bucks apiece. Whenever I don't it seems like the drivers side plugs up at the worst time. I looked around for another option but haven't been able to find anything that will work. BTW AgLaw I don't think anyone said PACCAR was better than Freightliner in these posts.

 

on the sprayer i added a small filter in the washer line. stopped plug ups