It’s getting late so I won’t write much right now. Longs story short, I’ve been sewing up vinyl interior bits for the Z. Pics below.
Material, Vinyl from Vyfab in Moorabbin (Great place for buying vinyl), Foam from Clark Rubber (Should have bought from Vyfab):
The Beast- a Pfaff 1245:
Doglegs- These were a straight cut-and-glue job. Turned out pretty well. I started off using ordinary contact adhesive (that syrupy goop) on the vinyl and spray-on contact adhesive on the foam. You can’t brush on the goopy stuff with foam because it eats it away. Anyway, I found out after I’d already done pretty much all of this that the trick is to thin down the contact adhesive 50% (maybe a tad more) with el cheapo paint thinners and using a spray gun. I did this on the door skins and it works great. Uses up a fair bit of thinners but you really save on the glue.
Windscreen Surrounds and headlining:
Gear Shifter Boot:
Polyprop interior panels. Notice how everything that needs to be on a flat, clean surface in order to take a photo ends up on top of a car?
Old Sunvisors. They’re a single piece of masonite with foam on each side and a wire frame surrounding it. The foam was pretty degraded.
New Sunvisors. They’re two pieces of 3mm MDF sandwiched around the wire frame.
Cut pieces of vinyl. You can tell I did this after the clock article because I still have writing on my knee.
I cut some extra bits of red to practise a bit with layering and back-seaming. I wanted to get this down before I attempted the doors.
The bits of red vinyl have a purpose…
I didn’t get the shape of the door cards right the first time, so I cut them, up,planed to shape and put some leftover fibreglass on top.
I was particularly fastidious with the marking out this time.
Here’s what I did with the door skins: I copied the pattern that was pressed into the stock door panel and recreated it with a red vinyl inlay. I figured that the stripey bit was made to replicate blind seam pleats, so I replicated the replicate blind seam pleats with… blind seam pleats.
This takes forever! I really enjoyed sewing for about half an hour now I hate it.
You can see how things didn’t quite add up in the end due to the pleated section shrinking more than expected from the blind seams.
In this photo, I’ve sewn down the top and bottom seam
And here they are, finished… Now I just have to put them on the door cards. I haven’t actually done this yet, and will update this post when I’m done.
