10/23/08
PF Coupe Interior Bits

One of the issues the David wanted me to address on his car was the rear section of the interior. On PF Coupes, this is not necessarily a seat, but it has a padded seat cushion that is covered in vinyl.

Unfortunately after 50 years, the foam padding has all disintegrated and is making a big mess. This section of foam was originally sewn to the back side of the vinyl cover.

There are small indents in the rear sheet metal for seat cushions, but these too turned to dust. Once all the loose and crumbling foam was vacuumed away, I could assess the situation.

The vinyl covers to the seat pad and wheel well covers were in decent shape, albeit a little hard and stained. Some of the stains were dirt, so I took these pieces home to thoroughly clean.

A lot of the dirt came out of the pieces, but there was still a little discoloration that would not go away. After cleaning these pieces as best as I could, I treated them with my favorite vinyl protectant. It is silicone free and when left to soak into vinyl does a pretty good job of getting the plastic soft again. These pieces will not look brand new again, but will certainly look better than before, even respectable!

Back at the car later in the week, I bought some foam to fill in the seat buckets. These will be covered with a sheet of foam across the whole width of the seat area, and will give our old seat pad a little more support than the crumbling old foam.

All sorts of other things were going on at François’ shop with 1747. The old fuel lines were disassembled and the parts that we’re keeping were put in the bag for the platers. It will be far cheaper to send all the pieces that need the same type of plating together in one batch, so we’re collecting one large bag of parts.

The fuel pick up was inspected and cleaned. The brass screen at the bottom of the tube was pretty corroded, not doing a very good job at screening out the debris in the tank. We’ll have to replace that as well.

With the drive shaft out, we took apart the u-joint and inspected all the needle bearings to check for broken or missing pieces. All 23 needle bearings in each cup was accounted for and in good shape.

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