Hi, I'm new to the forum and just bought my first Camaro, its a 86 2.8 v6 t-top. I plan on putting a v8 in but I wanna work on a few things on the interior and body first. I had a question about cracks on the dash and repainting most of the plastic pieces such side panels and the panels in the trunk.

As far as the dash goes, I searched around the forum and seen that theres really no way to avoid it besides rubbing on oils once in awhile and even so they still crack. My dash has a large crack on both driver side and passenger side and the corner of it on the driver side is broken off. I guess it would make sense just to buy a cover since I don't want to put too much money into the dash pad and it end up cracking again. How do the covers actually look once in the car, do they look much different than the stock dash pad?

The other question is about repainting the plastic panels, most are in decent conditions, no chunks taken out, but I was wondering how I should go about it. Some of them are kinda scratched up, should I get rid of those scratches then repaint the panels or would just repainting them do the trick? Also would there be a way so that if they would get scratched again the original red wouldn't show back through the black that I'm painting it.