Thursday, April 1, 2010

Time to start the interior...

I'm finally turning my attention to some of the interior renovation and have torn apart a fair amount of the dash, most of the connecting interior hardware, and have removed all of the carpet(which was a hassle since it was glued EVERYWHERE). The floors didn't look too bad in most spots except under the driver and passenger's feet where it was seriously rotted. I used a grinder with a cutting wheel to cut the floor out that was entirely rotted and plan on doing my tried and true 'AC Fabricator Floors' install. (Back when I went to work at a ski resort I owned a 1972 Ford Bronco with similar floor rot. Restoration shops love to charge hundreds of dollars to sell you new floorpans. I had an AC mechanical shop construct some floorpans out of galvanized sheet metal and I pop riveted them in, sealed them on the inside with body sealer and sealed them on the exterior with spray-on undercoating. Held up great and probably saved me $1000.) Since this is a renovation and not a restoration I plan on doing the same. I also started to grind down the interior metal to remove the surface rust for a similar treatment as I applied to the trunk. (you can see right is started vs. left that is not) .Also received a few more parts including a battery tray, some switch knobs and NEW bullet mirrors! Not as streamlined as I would have liked but I found these for $20 each on ebay. Done deal

More work..interior construction...etc

The door panels and interior components of the car were showing their age so I pulled all the carpet out and tossed it...ordered a new kit off of ebay somewhere (which looks pretty good actually) for $150 and decided to construct new interior panels. I found some pressed fiberboard at Home Depot that actually had a painted side (which I figured would make it a bit better at withstanding weather) and bought a large chunk to fabricate everything from. I forgot take pictures of the fabrication but this is what the stuff looks like.

I took some time tracing the door panels from the old ones which ended up being a trickier task than you would think - probably because the original panels were so old that they were warped or bent or just generally falling apart. It appears that some previous owner had also painted the vinyl of the old panels from red to black...the whole thing was a mess and I was glad to redo them.

We took the preconstructed panels up to a local upholstery shop in order to do the stitching. While they were there I also had them add some small pockets to the front of the panels where I felt it would be convenient to stash sunglasses, maps, etc. I was really pleased with how well they turned out - especially the stitching and the padding thickness the shop used. They are based in San Rafael and their contact info is to the right if you need work done. Tell them Cameron sent you.)

The rear boot divider was also repainted, warped, falling apart and had huge holes cut into it where the previous owner placed 6x9 speakers. Looked horrid.
I removed it, reconstructed a new panel out of the coated fiberboard and had the shop stitch in the verticals to break up the surface so it looked similar to the original. Everything turned out great and I was happy to have found Matt's small upholstery shop. He really does great work and everything turned out solid.