For what it's worth, here's what worked well for me.
Last year I purchased some American walnut burl veneer from Certainly Wood. I stopped at their facility on the way to Canada for a fishing trip and, quite frankly, was surprised I had a choice of American, French, English and Russian walnut.
I'll try to be as brief as possible with what I did. I probably went through more steps than necessary to laminate the dash. I first scraped off all the old veneer, sanded, filled some of the holes, and then resanded. To do the lamination, I used simple yellow glue and made a vacuum bag out of sheet vinyl. After using a roller to roll very even layers on the veneer and the dash face. After covering with wax paper and sandwiching between two slabs of particle board, the stack was placed in the bag, the bag sealed, and I pulled a vaccum with a vaccum pump I have. After a couple of hours, I pulled it out of the bag and used a dremel with a bit to route within a 1/4"-3/8" of the edges of the dash and the edges of the gauge openings. After chucking a fine sanding drum in the dremel, I sanded the rest of the way to the opening. Cutting the cubby cover free was a little more of a challenge since I did this with a new, sharp exacto knife and then sanded to the edge with the dremel.
Finish was multiple coats of brush on satin spar varnish- sanding in between coats down to the wood. This left small shiney spots where there were still depressions. I kept building up the coats in this manner until there were no more shiney areas after sanding. I lost track of the number of coats somewhere around 15. I then sprayed 5 coats of spar varnish on the front and back, lightly sanding in between coats.
Ron
71TR6