Interior Decorating…

While the Mustang has been away at the body shop,  I’ve been working on restoring the items that I took off the car and set aside during Project Paint. Since the car’s been gone, I’ve tackled big projects like the restoration of the heater core box  and lower dash in addition to re-gluing window brackets and polishing my window glass.

There’s one big project left that I can do before the Mustang comes back – the front and rear seat restoration. However, this job doesn’t require much in the way of paint so I decided this week to postpone working on it for a bit. I have a few items that do require painting and I wanted to get to those while the weather was still warm enough not to worry about the paint not adhering right.

What requires paint you may ask? Interior bits!

Restoring these pieces proved to be a bigger project than expected (where have we heard that before).

I started by inspecting the belt line trim attached to the upper door trim. The belt line trim is a piece of felt that presses up against the window helping to seal the door from moisture and debris. It also contains a chrome strip that goes along the top of the door because bling.

As expected, my belt line trim needed to be replaced.

In the image above, you can see the chrome strip as well as the torn felt that was the deciding factor to replace the belt line trim. You can also see the industrial-strength staple that attaches the belt line trim to the upper door trim.

The back side of the staple is no less intimidating:

The first order of business was removing those staples in order to free the belt line trim pieces. There are four pieces of this trim – one for each door and one on each of the interior quarter trim panels. How hard could it be?

Two hours later….

Not shown: One piece of trim that needed to be completely destroyed in order to be removed…

With the trim finally off, it was time to investigate how to put the new trim back on. Immediately after that, we had a “Houston, we have a problem” moment. The staple holes on the old trim don’t align with the staple holes on the new trim:

A little research indicates to me that this mis-alignment is not the fault of the reproduction part. It looks like the factory workers put the staples wherever they pleased and there wasn’t a set spot for them to go.

Hmmm… OK then.

My first idea was to use a pop rivet:

This worked great until I actually thought about it for a few minutes. Each pop rivet extends down a centimeter or so. If I were to rivet this trim into place, the extended rivets would then prevent the upper door trim from aligning with the door frame. To work around that, I’d have to drill into the door frame – something that does not appeal to me.

I then thought of a new plan – reading the directions. Naturally, these directions specifically stated NOT to use pop rivets. /sigh….

What the instructions say to do instead is clamp the belt line trim into place and drill through the belt line trim staple holes into the upper window trim:

After drilling the holes, you can use the provided staples to punch through both the belt line trim and the upper window trim to attach the two together:

While a pain, the process of getting the staples inserted wasn’t very hard. Getting the staples bent over is still something I need to figure out. At that point, I still needed to paint the upper door trim so all I did was dry fit the pieces together.

While doing the dry fitting though, I noticed that the driver’s upper door trim was damaged (surprise surprise). In the image below, you can see a small crack in the lower right portion of the trim and a subtle bend in the metal.

Thankfully, fixing that wasn’t terribly difficult. I hacked up a punch that I could use to hit the piece from behind:

I then flipped the trim panel over and clamped both ends to my work bench. A few dozen light taps on the back of the bend later and I was satisfied that the dent was largely invisible unless you were looking for it:

Satisfied that the upper door trim panels were ready to be stripped and painted, I turned my attention to the interior quarter trim panels.

These panels are what the rear seat passengers sit next to and were in rough condition with caked-on glue from the disintegrated insulation and rust in a number of places:

After media blasting and chemically treating the rust, the quarter trim panels were also ready for paint:

For good measure, I also prepped the gas pedal assembly

A-pillar trim:

And the kick panels for paint as well:

If you remember my experience with painting the lower dash, I wasn’t terribly happy with the end result:

…the paint didn’t apply evenly and there are some minor splotches and streaks that are visible – even after a few re-coats.

Considering that the upper door panel trim pieces and the interior quarter panels are made from the exact same patterned metal as the lower dash, I tried really really hard to do everything right. I repeatedly applied light coats as evenly spread as possible in an attempt to keep the paint even and smooth. For the most part, I was successful.

The upper door panel trim pieces turned out great:

The kick panels were awesome:

I was happy with how the A-pillar trim pieces turned out:

And the gas pedal assembly turned out well:

Unfortunately, the interior quarter panels ended up with similar issues to the dash. There’s barely visible “splotching” in a few places. Again, it’s worse in the picture than it is in person, but if the light catches the panels just right, it’s easy to see:

At this point, I’m either going to call out this paint as not living up to its on-line reputation.   It’s supposed to apply nice and even, but honestly it doesn’t appear to on the large pieces of metal where you have to make multiple passes to get coverage. It seems to do fine on smaller pieces and plastic, but bigger textured metal not so much.

It’s also possible that I’m doing something horribly wrong, but if so I don’t know what it could be. I read the instructions and followed them to the letter and was very careful with my application. In the end, the result was OK at best both for the dash and the interior quarter panels. Both pieces are good enough to not go and do over, but if I was trying to build a show car I’d be really unhappy with the result.

This week’s plan is to get the belt line trim attached everywhere it needs to go. I’ve already discovered one significant fit issue and I expect the process to take a while.