Turns out that the “missing” adapter isn’t readily available, so I dropped a note to Carl (who sells on eBay as capri_bits2) to see if he had one knocking about, and as luck would have it he had a couple still on their engines in the yard 
The old electrical pressure sender’s on the top (and needs a 24mm spanner to undo) and the pipe adapter’s on the bottom (but only needs a 14mm spanner).
Screw it into the block, attach the oil pipe that then runs up to the back of the gauge, fire up the engine and hey presto … we have pressure 
After a week of looking at the replacement dash covering and having another go at cutting one out, it still looks like something that would have failed me in the Blue Peter audition to be perfectly honest 
There’s nothing overly wrong with it, it’s just that Ford had a nice big stampy-thing for cutting theirs out so got nice clean edges which they then heat sealed for a perfect edge. You just can’t replicate that at home, unfortunately. If it had been one of those dashboards where the backing wraps round the edges, covers everything and the gauges are pushed through it, things would have been different. Ah well, it was worth a try 
Picked up a replacement dash unit from Carl which wasn’t worth his while selling on eBay due to the number of people who complain about stuff that’s even slightly damaged … even if you make it perfectly clear in the listing 
The “damage” consisted of a small nick in the spongy pad and a missing lug at the bottom – easily dealt with as we’ve seen before
After giving the dash pad a thorough going over with the steam cleaner, I added some bling 
The bling is part useful, part frivolous and part aesthetics. I needed somewhere to mount my little blue “fan whizzing” light, together with one for the alarm – but when I just put two on the dash pad it looked a bit barren, so I added another couple in for future use. No idea what they’d be for at the minute, but it was easy enough to put them in now rather than later 
Plus they’re pretty 
And so that it’s possible to connect wires to the rear of the lamps I made a small incision in the dashboard frame. It still needs a little tidying up, then everything can go back together.
