10/24/03
Moving Forward on the Rear

I finally found some time to go and work on the car, and I made some good progress. The rear seat area looks simple, but there are a lot of details that need to be addressed besides the obvious like making a new arm rest.

When I upholstered the back seat in August, I left the ends unattached, so it could be fitted to the curve of the wheel well. The Pininfarina factory used varying amounts of padding to fill out this area so I had to do the same.

Once the rear seat back was fitted, I needed to check the fit of the rest of the panel. Since I didn’t take this area apart, I had to guess where things lined up. The arrow shows an area where the piping of the seat sits in relation to the stitch on the wheel hump. Although I could have re-glued the leather so these lines lined up, I felt the stitch on the wheel well would have been too low.

Unfortunately, when I got home and looked at pictures I have of original cars, I saw they all lined up. At this point in the game, in order to fix this issue, I would have to make new wheel arch covers out of leather. I might be able to salvage some of these pieces for sewing, but most of it would have to come from my dwindling supply of hide. So far, I have decided to leave it alone. It may bother me and Frank, but unless I point it out to you, it might not be that noticeable. My mistake was to fit the wheel arch first before the rear seat back. The other problem is Frank forgets to keep a watchful eye on me when I’m barreling ahead with my interior!

These two arrows show the other areas that at least came out the way I wanted. The curve of the seat back matches the wheel arch perfectly, as well as the side panel, so all was not a loss!

Another area I noticed needing adjustment was the back of the seat where it meets the package shelf. There seems to be a 1/4 inch gap that I didn’t like, so I shimmed the shelf up to meet the back of the seat.

The seat cushions were next. The blue arrow shows a gap where you can see some of the aluminum insulation peeking through. The trick Frank suggests is to glue some scrap leather to the aluminum under this seam, so any gaps will only show more leather. The red arrow shows a larger gap that needed something more aggressive.

Since the seat pans are aluminum, I bent the rear portion of the seat cushion up a bit to close the gap, and added a little bit more stuffing to fill out that area.

With all the tweaking, the rear seat area was really coming together. I tried sitting in the back seat, and found hardly any headroom for my 5’10” frame. It’s too bad, because the seats were VERY comfortable.

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