I’ve been getting the blue SII 330GT 2+2 ready to ship to my upholsterer’s shop to complete the interior. There were a bunch of little things to address before the car went, but having the car on the ground and moving under it’s own power was a big milestone!

The new upholsterer is doing a great job dissecting the old seats, making new patterns, sewing up new covers, rebuilding the foam cushions, and fitting them to the seat frames.

I’ve been traveling down to his shop to inspect the work, and advising on the overall shape and look I’d like to see on Vintage Ferrari seats. The results so far look great.

I had to get to work on cleaning and painting the sub assemblies like seat rails so the interior can be assembled. This picture showed how SII 330s covered the seat adjuster rod with a thin piece of leather to finish off the steel rod. What’s interesting is some cars had this leather covering matching the color of the seat leather, while others used black leather. Since we’re changing the color of the original of the leather to a darker color, we will have to decide if we will go with black leather or the tobacco leather to cover this rod.

Now was the time to polish the knobs for the seat adjusters.

I tried my best to sort through the electrics in this car before the upholstery was installed to avoid having the take things apart. When I originally took the gauges out of the car, I labeled all the wiring as it was unplugged, but as I finally plugged everything back in and powered up the dash, I found some problems. Since this car was not running when I started the disassembly, I had no idea someone had re-wired some of the gauge wires, so plugging them back in as I found them showed that the last person who was in there had made a mistake or created a problem. Unfortunately, that meant I had to take the gauges back out and fix these problems and decipher what they did. This is very common on a project car that was not running when a restoration is started, but by the end of the day, I had it figured out!

Although I had the electric window motors working properly along with the wiring to the switches, I found both switch contacts having problems. I’ll send these switches out for rebuilding, and probably relay them to cut down on the current that passes through these switched to avoid burning them out again!

Since the seats to this car were at the upholsterer’s shop getting recovered, I installed a spare seat bottom I had at my shop as a temporary seat so the car could be driven a little safer. I tried to move the car sitting on the floor, but it was too low to drive the car safely, so I bolted this seat cushion in for now.

New carpets, headliner, and door panels can’t really be installed or fabricated until the upholsterer has the car. I am often asked if ready-made kits that are sold online are any good, and I often say they’re not good enough for my tastes. Custom cutting the carpets, and fitting the door cards precisely to each panel insures all the gaps are even and covering the floor pans underpayment. These were all hand made cars, so no two cars are exactly the same. Saving some time or money buying a ready made kit is too much of risk to see an ugly gap or poorly fitting panel for eternity!