A little update,
Making a new dash with some old mahogany and ash inlay glued onto half inch ply.
There is something very satisfying about sanding old wood and bring it back to it's former glory.
I put a rim around it just a few mm proud and then filled it with epoxy resin and let it level out.
Now for any of you into the technical side of things

My GPS from the other boat has a built in engine management system that runs off a NMEA 2000 backbone so with this I can do away with all the gauges and run every thing off this although I might just piggyback off the old gauges and keep them where the fuse panel is as a backup and to help calibrate the new ones, my only problem it that the NMEA runs off a digital signal sort of plug and play with all modern engines these days and my old BMC has analogue switches as digital wasn't even thought of back then

to get around this I using an AlbaCombi to convert the signal
http://www.albacombi.com/ with this I can read everything on the boat and add more if needed like water and waste tank levels.