How to get a dent out of a midyear Corvette’s glove box door

Update by Tim Suddard to the Chevrolet Corvette Coupe project car
Feb 26, 2025 | Chevrolet, Chevrolet Corvette

Photograph by Chris Tropea

A midyear Corvette has one of the most iconic interiors of any sports car. It features two huge binnacles; one for the gauges, and one houses the glove box.

On our 1965 Corvette, the glove box door had a dent right in the middle of it, while the surround had peeling black paint. These blemishes let down an otherwise nice, original interior.

Photograph by Tim Suddard

For a while, we hunted for a used glove box door. They were either in worse shape than ours or were sold instantly for $300 to $500.

While at the Daytona Turkey Run searching for Corvette parts, we ran into a guy with quite a stash of C2 parts. He told us that while he didn’t have a glove box door, you could just buy the easily dented aluminum panel. Then you could repair, rather than replace, the original glove box door.

What he didn’t tell us is how darned difficult this job was.

Sure enough, a quick search on Corvette Central’s website confirmed that for less than $60, we could, in fact, buy just the aluminum glove box panel. It comes as a kit with small, black Allen bolts to attach the panel to.

Photograph by Tim Suddard

The kit did not come with instructions, but with as much general restoration knowledge as we have, we took a look and saw what looked to be rivets holding the whole assembly together.

Assuming that they were in fact rivets, we grabbed a drill and started drilling them out. Only when we got the assembly apart–it consists of the outer rim, the aluminum center panel, and the back of the glove box–did we realize that we had made a bad mistake: The alleged rivets were not actually rivets at all, but posts built into the glove box surround hat had been peened over to form what looked like rivet heads.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

With this kit, the correct way to do this repair is to cut or grind off these heads so that the post is saved in its entirety. You then drill and tap with a 3/64-inch drill and an 8-32 tap.

You have to be especially careful drilling for your tap: If you drill too far, you will drill right through the glove box door surround. Make this mistake, and you will then need to use epoxy to fill the holes.

While this repair kit is not concours correct, and you will get dinged for points at an NCRS show if you use the black Allen bolts that come with the kit, there is a solution to make the repair even more accurate.

Supposedly, you can carefully cut off the rivet heads, epoxy the three parts of the door together, and then use super glue to attach the rivet heads back on.

While we are trying to make the car as correct as is reasonably possible, after three hours of screwing with what we thought was going to be a simple repair, we used the small black Allen head bolts that came with the kit and called it a day.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

Despite having originally drilled the rivets heads too deep, we were able to get threads to hold in all but a couple. For those two, we used epoxy to hold the bolts in.

One last caveat in this rather frustrating repair: The Corvette script on the aluminum panel is fastened on in the same manner. If you cut off the rivet heads, there is no way to reuse your original script. Thankfully with some careful epoxy work, we were able to get the original script to stay in place on the replacement aluminum panel.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

Honestly, the whole process was a bit frustrating, and some forethought or directions would have made this whole job easier. Still, once we cleaned the chrome on the surround and on the locking mechanism and masked and painted the door surround with SEM 39143 black trim paint, we did have a perfect-looking glove box door that really made our interior start to look truly wonderful again. We will just have to lock the glove box door if we ever enter a NCRS concours event.

Photograph by Chris Tropea