Upholstering the Trunk



When I picked up the seat from the upholsterer he told me had some of the red vinyl left over. I decided to take it an practice my ability as an upholsterer on the trunk. This is going to be a hot rod and upholstering the trunk is really a bit over the top but what the heck, its good practice.

While at the upholsterers shop I also picked up some 1/4" sew foam which will give the tuck and roll or pleats as I like to call them some depth. I was a little worried about sewing though the foam material and vinyl with an expensive computerized embroidery sewing machine but my lovely wife assured me it would handle it. That said, I'm no fool and if I broke here machine I'd never here the end of it so I drafted her to do the actual sewing. That way if the machine broke, I wouldn't get blamed... well at least not as much if it were me doing the sewing.

We had some black vinyl left over from a previous project and decided to more or less duplicate what the upholsterer had done with the seat. My wife suggested that some custom embroidery might add a custom touch and since her machine does do embroidery we thought we would give it a try. As you can see in the pics it came out pretty good.





The vinyl was glued to Luann plywood that had been cut to size and was fitted to the existing plywood bulkheads using industrial strength Velcro. That way it is removable in case I ever need to get behind there and perform maintenance on the wiring. Here are the finished pictures.









The results were not perfect but definitely acceptable. Although it is not "show" quality it was good practice and this experience will be helpful when we get to the door panels in a couple months.





I'm currently working on several small projects that need to be done before final sanding and paint. I've swapped out the points system for an electronic unit, replaced the center carb with one that was built especially for this application and I'm also mounting the master cylinder and pedal assembly.



Check back often for more updates...





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