More interior work done

[Belair-o]

Progress! Good job, rock and roll!

[chevynut]

Trying to move forward with the interior now that the headliner is finished. With the padding that's going to be put on the front of the seat bases, and the large 3" overhang, I decided to take 1/2" off the front. It's not a big difference, but I think it will look better with the valence underneath the seats.

Early this week I went down to Denver to discuss thread size and color with Ron at Auto Weave. I didn't want to send samples back and forth so it made more sense to me to go there since we need to nail this down so Larry can do the padded dash. Larry had talked to Ron and told me they found a color called "Chinese Rust" that was the closest match to the tan leather that they could find in the larger size thread. Larry told me that he uses 138 thread and knowing that he doesn't like contrasting decorative thread I suspected it wasn't big enough for my tastes. I told him I probably wanted a larger thread. When I went to see Ron he had a sample of charcoal leather sewn with Chinese Rust 270 thread and another with 138 kind of a taupe color. This is all done with 4 stitches per inch. I think the rust color would pretty much disappear in the 138 size. Ron didn't have any of the tan leather, which Larry told me he'd take to him so we couldn't really see what it looked like on that.

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We decided that the color should work good with the tan leather and we all agreed that the 270 thread is probably too big for what I want. I'm not even sure why they used that size for a sample because I didn't ask for it. Ron said the 270 thread is easy to snag and he doesn't recommend it for seats. I mentioned a 210 thread and Ron said he's never heard of it. I pulled it up on my phone in Chinese Rust and the thread thickness is about halfway between the 138 and the 270.

I'm still unsure about what to do. Thread colors are pretty limited in the larger thread sizes. I've been focusing on the charcoal dash so much that I didn't think about the contrasting thread on my seats, which will be mostly tan with charcoal inserts. I don't know if it makes sense to use charcoal contrast thread on the seat seams or not. Usually contrast threads are lighter color than the leather. I could go with a light tan that shows up on both colors of leather but I'm still thinking about it. I have other charcoal leather areas that we could put decorative thread on at the seams, or create seams to give some detail to the interior.

I'm also looking at the rest of the interior and I wanted to use some carbon fiber accents in the car. I saw some carbon fiber work at SEMA where they used regular charcoal fiber cloth and tinted the epoxy different colors. This is an all carbon fiber 69 Camaro body.

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I ran across some orange hybrid cloth that uses carbon fiber and aramid (Kevlar) fiber to give a pretty unique look. I want to cover the wood on my door spears so I need to think about how to do that. The orange would complement the car color and the color of the thread. But the regular gray carbon fiber would also go well with my charcoal leather. Decisions, decisions....

[WagonCrazy]

This is such a personal taste/choice decision that I don't feel compelled to give my opinion. I think you are miles ahead of me on this anyway. Keep on with it Laszlo!

[chevynut]

Thanks Paul. I know this is a personal taste thing and I'm trying to visualize how it looks before I do it. I'm fairly good at that but it's a scary thing to commit to something you'll have to live with "forever". That's why I've been asking for stitch samples. The problem is Larry keeps dropping the ball on this stuff. He should have gotten me stitch samples on both colors of leather with a couple of different thread sizes and colors so we could get past this quickly. I've been asking him for some samples for months.

[chevynut]

While waiting for Larry to come over to work on the foam on the rear seats, I removed the armrests and added two stiffeners to the backside. one stiffener is at the top where a person's arm would lay, and another one is on the side where the seat foam will push against it. The armrests are made of aluminum but they flexed quite a bit and the stiffeners made of 1/16" x 3/4" aluminum angle really stiffened them up.

I also put a strip of neoprene foam on the chrome liftgate hinge cover and got it installed. This allowed me to leave the rivets intact while making a nice-looking closed gap between the cover and the body.

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I have to design the cargo area panels and figure out how to cover the tubs. In retrospect, I wish I'd not made the tubs as wide as I did. I only needed about 1-1 1/2" but I brought them all the way in to the frame rails. I was originally planning to cover the tubs with leather or carpet, but not we're going to enclose them. I also have to remove the rear structure again and raise the bottom 1/4" because Larry wants carpet and pad under it. I originally only planned for carpet.

I'm still working on the details of the color scheme for the interior.

[WagonCrazy]

Didn't you have a battery access door cut into the rear passenger inner fender? How will you deal with that if you enclose the inner fender?

[chevynut]

Didn't you have a battery access door cut into the rear passenger inner fender? How will you deal with that if you enclose the inner fender?

No, my battery is a drop-down stainless box behind the rear tire.

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[chevynut]

I got back from Montana almost two weeks ago and texted Larry when I was driving home to let him know. I heard nothing in reply so I texted him again 4 days later and asked when he wanted to come work on the rear seat foam. He replied that he'd be over "sometime next week". A week later he finally showed up. He hasn't done a thing in 6 weeks except come over for less than an hour a month ago to tell me what clearances he wanted around the seat boards.

Anyhow, he took the seat boards and I told him I needed them back finished with foam so I can contour the rear of the console to match. I'm heading to our place in Texas on the 4th for a week and I hope he gets it done before I leave, but I'm not holding my breath. He still has several weeks of work on his shop and his telling me last August that a June 1 completion "shouldn't be a problem" seems to be a problem now. Even with Ron doing the seats the rest of the interior needs work. If push comes to shove I will have Ron do some more of it and bill Larry. If he doesn't like that I'll fire him and have Ron finish the car.

I've been working on doing the final riveting on the front part of the console. It's been held together for a long time with Clecos. I also added some detail to the console trim pieces to complement the door spears. They will be covered with leather.

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[Belair-o]

Very cool custom work you are designing and building!

[567chevys]

Very Nice work Laszlo ,

Should be a very bad ass 56 Mad when you get it done

Sid