Alright, so let's talk about material options for your dash panel. Now the main material that we recommend is acrylic. And with acrylic, you have two main options, we have a glossy option, and a matte option. Really the big difference is just aesthetic. I would say the glossy is more popular, a lot of people like the fact that it matches their gloss on their electronics.
Now the tradeoff of that is it does show kind of fingerprints and some of your small scuffs a little more than the matte. So if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, the matte might be better for you, the matte is a little bit more expensive, I would say in the area 30% more expensive. So if you're price conscious, it might be best to do the glossy acrylic.
Now if you really want a budget option. Another thing we could do is king star board, we do some king starboard dash panels, we do very little out of black starboard, mostly because black starboard does show scuffs and scratches a lot. But if you wanted it in white, and you really wanted to go for the most budget option, we could do king star board. If you did king star board and you wanted to go with a white, we would recommend ordering a sample chain so that you can match the colour of your gel coat. If you have any other questions, give us a call.
Alright, so let's talk about how you're going to mount your electronics to your dash panel. Now there's two main ways that we do it. One that we recommend, the way that we recommend is called Face mounting. And I'll show you what that looks like right here. With face mounting, you're actually going to mount your electronics to your new dash panel. Now with that the electronics will sit a little bit proud.
And the nice thing about modern electronics is the housing on them is pretty low profile, you can see for the most part, these only set maybe a quarter of an inch or so proud off of your dash. So they really for the most part look pretty flush. Anyway, the nice thing about these is you can still use your son covers and they're relatively easy to service, you can still pull out a single unit and service that or swap it out if you needed to. It's a much easier installation. And really generally our recommendation for the way that you could do it.
Now, if you wanted to go a little bit more advanced one option is you are able to do what we call a flush mounting with flush mounting. I've got an example of that right here. With flush mounting, what you do is you actually mount your electronics to your fibreglass. Now that's a little bit tricky because you have to have no holes in your existing fibreglass. And you have to mount your electronics exactly where we've specified based off the dash panel that we're going to provide.
To do that, we have to provide you with a drill template that you would use to locate all of your electronics and locate the different studs that we would ship this with for sliding and mounting the electronics. But when you do that, you're able to slide this, it's really more of a cover now at this point over your electronics and you can see that the dash panel on the electronics are perfectly flush. And it's really an attractive look. We do it for a lot of boat builders. The negative is again, you can't use your sun covers and it is quite a bit more difficult from a standpoint of servicing it. So it's all really a tradeoff of how much do you value that quarter of an inch. Is it okay if it sits proud or does it need to be flush?
Alright, so let's talk about how we're going to mount the new dash panel to your fibreglass we have two options. Both work great, the most budget option is to simply use fasteners, I've got some examples here, you can see the customer on the right fastened through his stainless steel screws. The customer on the left though used powder coated screws, I can show you what that looks like right here. So we can supply you with powder coated screws that really go a long way to hiding your, the screw in your dash panel.
So that's a great option and definitely the most budget way but a way that you could step it up a notch from an aesthetic perspective would be to hide the fasteners completely by using threaded inserts and studs. And that's what I've done in this case. So if I pull this dash panel off, you can see that the way we've built it, we've put threaded inserts and studs in the back. And the way this all works is we would supply you with a plywood drill template that you would set in place on your dash and drill all your through holes like you see here. And then you would just be able to take the dash panel and set the studs through those drill holes.
Get it lined up and then come in from the back. You do need rear access coming from the back with a lock nut to tighten it into place. This is really a good high end option for your hiding your fasteners.
