Interior Trim and Etc.

Here is another rather long post covering five months of work.  Progress has been slow this year due to interruptions and the very difficult nature of interior trim work.  The interior is not complete yet, but I think an update post is overdue so here goes!

 • Underside of bonnet finished and set aside

After completing the rock-chip coating and painting and finished assembly of the underside of the bonnet I set it aside in a corner of the garage to await the completion of the rest of the car.  It is sitting on an inch of soft blankets and covered completely with soft moving blankets to try and protect it from damage for the next six or eight months.

Here is the finished bonnet waiting for the rest of the car to be completed.  It will be the last thing to go on, even after the rest of the car is finished and running.

 

• Wire loom installed to left and right rear lights

Before starting the installation of any of the interior trim, starting at the rear of the car, the new rear wiring harnesses needed to be installed, as the upholstery covers and hides the wires and the openings that permit access to the wires.  In this case the rear wire looms supply electricity to the dome light, the tail lights, the fuel pump, and the fuel level gauge.  There are two harnesses, one going down each side of the car through the body above the rear wheel arches.  These wire looms were pulled through and connected to their destinations with new connectors and anchored by metal tabs that are welded to the body along the wire route and covered with plastic protectors to prevent the wire insulation from being damaged against the sharp edges of the steel tabs.  The original plastic protectors had become shrunken and stiffened so could not be reused.  I used electrical heat-shrink tubing to cover the tabs; it works great.

Right-side wire loom leading to right tail lights.

Wire loom pulled through the body cavity with string that was put in place when the original wire was pulled out.

Left-side wire loom connecting to left tail light and fuel tank pump and level sensor.

 

• A month delay while painting a KIA Rio.

Not that I need excuses for being slow in my work on the Jaguar, after all, it was undertaken as a project to entertain me for a few years and there is no real hurry to get it finished, but I did have to postpose work on the car while I repaired and painted a little KIA Rio5 for one of my daughters.  The car had been hit in the rear and needed a new bumper cover and hatch door along with paint to the left fender and the hood of the car.  My son Josh helped me spray the paint in the BYU paint booth.  The job came out well.  

 

KIA repair:  Rear hatch and bumper and front fender and hood were all repaired and repainted.

  

• Painted the new fuel tank

Back to the Jaguar, the new fuel tank is galvanized inside and out to protect it from corrosion, but it is painted with a dull black coating that is thick and tough but not pretty.  Since half of the tank is visible as installed in the boot of the car, I wanted it to look as nice as the rest of the painted surfaces of the car so I repainted the top side of the tank with plain gloss black two-stage urethane.  It looks much better and will make a better impression when the boot is opened.

New fuel tank repainted with two-stage gloss black.

 

• Rear bumpers installed

Paying attention to sequence of operations, the rear bumpers have to be installed before the fuel tank can be, as the tank hides the screws that fasten the bumpers in place.  Fitting these newly chromed bumpers was a very difficult task.  They did not fit well.  The curvature of the bumpers did not match that of the fenders where the bumpers mount.  I had to grind away a significant amount of metal from the edges of the bumpers to get them to fit, even with the thick rubber seals that go all around the bumpers between the edges of the bumpers and the body. 

Holding that rubber seal in place while mounting the bumper is a challenge.  I did it by gluing the rubber seal to the edge of the bumper with the same rubber cement that I used on the headliner.  That seemed to work.

Because the curvatures did not match it was very difficult to get the fastening screws through the body and into the threaded nuts welded in the bumpers.  For the two forward-most holes I had to use longer screws than the originals and when pulled tight the longer screw on one side actually did some damage to the chrome surface from the inside of the bumper.  This was discouraging but there was nothing I could do once the damage was done.

After many hours of work I finally had both bumpers installed and looking more or less like they were supposed to.

Rubber seals and vertical over-riders are preassembled to the bumpers.  Custom spacers had to be made which is typical in fitting many Jaguar parts together.  In their factory condition they don't seem to fit very well!

Right side bumper ready to fit to the car.  Again custom spacers had to be made to fit the bumpers to the fenders.

Both rear bumpers are installed, along with tail lights.  All had been re-chromed over a year ago.

   

• Tail lights installed

After the bumpers, of course, come the tail lights.  These fit up better than the bumpers but still not great.  The curvature of the body where the tail lights mount is complex, and though the light bezels are curved similarly to try and match the curvature of the fender, the two curves do not match very well and again, the rubber seal does not completely hide the problem.  I see many photos of E-Type tail lights just like mine that appear to fit perfectly against the body.  I don’t know how they do that.  Maybe the fender shape is modified with Bondo to match the light bezels before the car is painted.  I may never know.

• Heater pipes installed in dashboard

Moving to the front of the car the first pieces that have to be installed in the firewall are the heater pipes.  My original pipes were made of carbon steel and the ends were completely rusted away, so I purchased a new set of stainless steel pipes.  These have to be installed first because all the other parts that go into the dash area go on top of or behind these pipes.  They would be impossible to install, for example, if the windshield wiper mechanism were installed first.

The pipes came perfectly shaped to go right into position behind the firewall.  I had had my original small mounting plates plated with black Chromate instead of painting so I used them instead of painting the new plates.  It was again a struggle to get all of the pop rivets to go into all of the holes, but with patience the job was done and the new tubes are ready to connect to the system.

  

Here you see four of the heater pipes sticking through the firewall.  They are held in place by the little "D"-shaped rings with pop rivets.

Here are the rest of the heater-pipe ends.  These are now stainless steel so should last a long time.

• Windshield wipers installed

With the heater pipes installed it was natural to then put in the windshield wiper mechanism.  This is a tricky assembly to install.  It has to be put into the small openings in the dash wall in three pieces and then screwed together in place inside the dash.  If it ever fails in service most of the dash would have to be disassembled to remove the mechanism.  I think if it does fail I will just leave it broken because it is too hard to service and I don’t plan to ever take the car out in the rain anyway!

Along with the wipers go the windshield sprayers.  These I bought new with new tubing as the old was hardened and brittle and would break if bent while assembling, so all new fittings and tubing were used.

Wiper assembly assembled out of the car.  It had to be taken apart to install it into the dashboard of the car.

This is the complicated "Parking" mechanism that stops the wiper blades against the bottom of the windshield when the switch is turned off.  I had to totally restore this device with new plastic insulators.

 

Windshield wiper mechanism with parking device installed in the dashboard.

The left-hand crank that rotates the wiper blade.  There are three cranks and three wiper blades.

• Windshield washer bottle installed.  

The sprayer tubes connect through the firewall to the spray bottle, which I had restored previously so I proceeded to mount it on the front side of the firewall next to the wiper motor.  This bottle assembly had been totally frozen up with crud and corrosion but with a little effort it cleaned up OK, even the pump motor cleaned up and ran again when I put power to it.  I think the unit will operate fine although I have not put water in it to test it.  

The windshield washer bottle, restored to like-new condition and mounted on the firewall.

  

Restored washer bottle and holding bracket with new LUCAS decal.

• Boot lid latch and release installed

Back to the rear of the car, before any of the interior trim panels could be installed the boot-lid release mechanism and cable had to be installed, as it again is inaccessible once the upholstery is in place.  I had cleaned and re-plated the latch mechanism and the release lever and I bought a new control cable to go between the handle and the release mechanism.  The original cable was rusty beyond repair.  This cable and mechanism has to be reliable as it is difficult to get access to it if it should fail in service, and it is used very often to release the boot lid which happens almost as often as opening the passenger door.  The whole thing went together pretty well compared with the bumpers, and I believe it will be reliable.

The restored boot-lid latch, upside down but ready to be installed.

The restored release lever, also ready to be installed.

  

Installed release lever and latch mechanism, with new cable connecting them inside the fender.

• Fuel fill lid installed and drain tubes

Also, before the fuel tank is installed, the drain and overflow tubes from the fuel fill port to the tank and ground need to be installed.  I had bought new tubing for these and while hooking them up I mounted the fuel-port lid with its spring and bumpers.  It requires fitting to the opening in the fender which proved to go well.  I had previously fitted the lid while doing the body work and had adjusted the shape of the opening to fit the lid.  It had been a poor fit-up from the factory!

Hinged fuel-fill lid installed - new rubber bumpers

Fuel-fill lid with much better fitting opening in the fender.

  

• Rear wheel arch covers glued on

After 3 ½ years of work, this finally has been the most difficult task I have faced in restoring this car.  The rear wheel arches have an extreme curvature, and the Moquette wool material that covers them, as attractive and luxurious as it is, has almost no ability to conform to compound curvature.  I found it impossible to glue down this material without leaving wrinkles around the edges.  For me it was like trying to make corrugated cardboard conform smoothly over the surface of a basketball; basically impossible to accomplish without gross wrinkles.

 Trying to fit  stiff wool moquette to the rear wheel arch.

Quarter-inch foam stretched and glued over the right-side rear wheel arch

This is my attempt to stretch the moquette over the wheel arch using a turnbuckle - didn't really work very well.

The finished right-side wheel arch - Not perfect but the best I could do as an amateur.

I first glued down ¼ inch foam to the arches, as was done originally and the foam came with the kit that I purchased.  The foam did conform fairly easily to the contours.  I tried everything I could think of to make the wool conform.  It simply would not stretch.  I tried using steam on the areas that were wrinkling but that just damaged the wool surface leaving permanent discoloration.

Finally I set up a stretching system using a clamp on the material and a large turnbuckle to pull the clamp stretching the fabric over the arch.   With this device I was able to get rid of some of the wrinkles, but not all.  After weeks of trying different ideas and just procrastinating I finally decided that I could live with some wrinkles; I just had to move on and get to the next steps in the restoration.  I was wasting too much time on a problem that for me was unsolvable.  So I pulled the material with my turnbuckle and glued it down as best I could and will just have to ignore the wrinkles that I could not get out.  They will match the other wrinkles that I could not get out on the felt edges that go all around the headliner, and some vinyl wrinkles that I could not get out on the cover plate that goes above the license-plate area inside the boot.

With those wheel arches done I could now go on to other difficult aspects of the interior trim.

• Cubby floor prepped and Hardura put down

The area immediately behind the seats is called the “Cubby” area. It consists of a triangular shaped space covered by a hinged lid that extends the boot floor by 8 inches when it is in the down position and provides a buffer in the up position to prevent luggage from sliding into the back of the seats under hard braking. 

The bottom of the Cubby is a piece of hard-surface vinyl called Hardura.  It is flexible but thick and hard.  In the original car it laid over a thick kind of tarpaper underlay that bridged the stiffening grooves in the body.  I have the original underlay piece but it is so beat up and dirty I didn’t want to reuse it.  So I covered the steel body surface with Duramat to give it some noise and vibration damping similar to the original underlay.  I filled in the stiffening grooves with strips of Duramat to give a flat surface for the Hardura.

First I filled the stiffening pockets in the cubby floor with strips of Dynamat to level the floor.

Then I covered the entire cubby floor with a layer of Dynamat to absorb vibration, heat, and sound.

This vinyl material is called Hardura and is used on the several floor locations in the car.  It is stiff and hard and will only lay flat.

 The front wall of the “Cubby” is a vinyl-covered steel piece that I covered with new material from my kit.  This front wall is a little tricky to mount because it is held in place by four pop rivets at each end which go through holes in the rear wheel arches.  The holes in the arches had been covered by the Moquette but I was able to get access to them from under the wheel well and push through a sharp tool from the bottom.  I was able to get all of the new pop rivets into the original holes.  

Cubby area with floor and newly covered front wall installed.  The little chrome brackets on the wheel arch above the cubby are retaining blocks to secure the cubby lid when it is in the up position. 

The hinged cover piece is plywood covered with green vinyl.  My original wood was in perfect condition so I recovered it with the sheet vinyl that came in the kit for that purpose.

There are a number of chrome parts that attach to this plywood lid and mine were all OK with the original plating, except the hinges which were a little rusty, so I had them replated.  When it was all together it looked fine so I mounted it back in its original position and it fit well.

Cubby lid being recovered.  All the chrome pieces are original except the hinges which have been re-chromed.  The rubber fill strips in the luggage rail extensions are original!

The cubby lid in its down position.

The cubby lid in its up position.

This Cubby is one of the unique and signature features of all original E-Types, so it was satisfying to me to have it restored and finished and looking like new.

• Bulkhead behind seats covered

The next difficult piece was the Moquette wool that glues over the bulkhead just behind the seats.  Here again the contour is difficult and the wool has to stretch to conform to the complex shape.  My approach with this piece was to glue down the upper edge first, which required no contouring.  With this glue dry I processed to apply adhesive to just about one inch of material down from the upper surface.  This upper inch required the most severe stretch and I was miraculously able to accomplish the stretch because there was no place where the material had to compress or squeeze together to prevent wrinkling.  It was all in tension.  

By applying glue just one inch at a time and pushing the wool into that inch I was able to get the material stretched in successfully.  But, unfortunately, after a half hour or so of being glued, the tightest areas pulled loose.  I think the paint pulled off of the metal as the bonding strength of the paint is probably not as great as the strength of the adhesive.  In any case it would be a major task to pull it all off again and that would probably ruin the wool so I opted to just leave it pulled loose in the corners.  In the end it is impossible to see the problem when the seats are installed as it will be hidden behind the seats.  Only I will know of the defect and it will annoy me along with all the other failures that I am experiencing with this difficult interior.

The bulkhead just behind the seats was another difficult stretch of the Moquette material.  I think the adhesive pulled the paint off of the metal.  Fortunately with the seats in place not much of this bulkhead can be seen.

• Pedal box and steering shaft installed

Here was some mechanical work that I turned to for relief from the discouraging upholstery tasks.  The pedal box had been previously restored over a year ago and was ready to install.  I had to re-order the box mounting gaskets because the ones that came with a kit I had ordered were for a different vehicle.  I sent a note to the vendor pointing out the error and they thanked me and gave me free shipping on my next order, which I appreciated.

The pedal box went in without any issues and next to it went the throttle-pedal bell crank and steering shaft guide box.  These also went in fine and I assembled the lower steering shaft with its new universal joints at both ends.  I do look forward to finishing all of the mechanical reassembly which entails far fewer problems than the trim installation.

Pedal box restored awaiting installation.  The rubber bellows is the device for providing vacuum assist when braking.  It is the original bellows!

The finished pedal box mounted on the firewall in the car.  The small aluminum box next to it is the throttle bell crank housing and guide for the lower steering shaft.

• Right side rear upper trim installed with latch cover

Back to the interior trim work.  I spent another full day making the vinyl-covered trim piece that goes above right-side rear wheel arch fit into place correctly.  It came in the interior kit a little off in dimension so I had to cut and re-glue the hard board panel and the vinyl that covers it.  It had been installed at the factory with three fewer clips than are called for in the hard board panel.  I could tell that the clips had not been included in the original assembly because there were no holes for them in the body.  I drilled the new holes and put in all the designated mounting clips, as well as a couple of finish screws that hold the piece in place.  

To locate the screw holes in the trim piece to match the existing holes in the body I made a small tool, a sort of transfer punch, that lets me transfer the location of the hole in the body to the hard board panel.  The tool worked pretty well on this piece but not perfectly.  The alternative to using it would be to just drill new holes through both the hard board panel and the steel body.  This I was hesitant to do as I wanted to use all the original holes as much as possible.

Tool for transferring the locations of existing body holes on to the new interior panels.

Vinyl-covered trim panel in place over right-side wheel arch.

 

• With the upper trim panel installed on the right side the right-side Cantrail could be installed.  The Cantrails were recovered as part of the interior kit that I purchased for the car.  The new covering was put over the original steel bases so they fit back together using all the original screw holes that were already present in the parts.  There is a little triangular piece of steel that is covered with black vinyl and fits at the corner of the A-pillar where that A-pillar meets the edge of the dashboard.  One of these little triangles I had lost somewhere along the disassembly path or else it had been missing when I got the car.  In any case I had to fabricate a new one from some scrap 18-gauge steel which was not difficult.  I recovered both triangles with thin black leather and refitted them to the existing holes in the cantrails and the body. 

I was surprised at how well the screw holes all lined up when I replaced all the screws that hold the cantrail in place.  I hope the left side goes together as well as the right.  The boot lid has to be finished before the left side can be started.

Right-side cantrail showing the little triangular leather-covered piece where the A pillar meets the dashboard.

Rear half of right-side cantrail installed.  This piece in screwed to the body using all the original screw holes and mostly original (re-plated) screws

The entire finished cantrail installed.

• Boot lid trim installed and lid fitted to car

There is a sequence of interior operations that needs to be followed throughout the restoration process.  I have erred in following the correct sequence once already and paid the price in quality of the work.  I am being more careful now and hope to avoid any more such problems.  One such situation is in the fitting of the left side upper trim panel above the left wheel arch and below the boot-lid hinges.  Before that piece can be fitted the boot-lid hinges have to be place and properly adjusted so the lid closes perfectly.  The trim panel then covers the hinges so once it is in place the hinges can no longer be adjusted.  Once the upper trim panel is in place then the cantrail can be fitted over the trim panel.  The lower trim panels that go just behind the side doors cannot be fitted until the vinyl trim over the door sills and rear door jams has been installed.  All of this sequence is critical to a successful interior restoration.

Following that sequence the boot lid is the next item to be fitted.  I started to fit it with help from my son, Josh, but it did not go well.  The door is too flexible to hold its shape when closing against the stiff latch spring.  We decided that the glass needs to be installed first to stiffen the door then then the alignment should be more easily achieved.

Before the glass can be installed in the door all of the vinyl trim must be glued in and wrapped around the window opening, then the window glass locks in the vinyl.  So I spent the next couple of weeks fitting the trim to the inside of the door.  As of this writing we have not yet installed the glass or tried to finish the alignment of the door.  That will have to come in the next post.

The new hardboard panel that came with my interior kit did not fit the door well.  I had to peel off the vinyl and trim 3/8  inch off of the side of the board to make it match the door curvature.

With the lower panel attached to the door the vinyl is glued and trimmed to the pinch weld where the window will hold it in place. Notice the upper piece of vinyl waiting on the table to be installed (glued on) next.

The lower trim panel is being glued around its edges to the pinch weld where the window will be fitted.

• I decided that while waiting for help to fit the boot-lid glass I would begin the installation of the “Dynamat” insulation on the floor and transmission tunnel of the cockpit.  This Dynamat is a rubber-backed aluminum foil that is cut and stuck to the floor and firewall and sometimes roof and doors of cars in restoration to reduce vibration noise inside the car and to reduce the amount of heat coming through the firewall and transmission tunnel.  I applied this mat to the floors of the Volkswagen when I restored that interior and I think it does help give the car a more solid feel and quiets down vibration noise.  It especially helps the doors close more quietly.  It took me an entire week to cover the floors of the Jag but I believe it is worth the time and the cost to give a more solid feeling to the car when on the road.

This polymer-based (looks and behaves like sticky tar backed by Aluminum foil) is called Dynamat and can be cut and stuck to floor, firewall, transmission tunnel and inside of door skins to reduce vibration noise and insulate from heat.  It is an excellent product and will make the car quieter and more comfortable to drive.

As I am still waiting for help with the rear window glass, I have tackled the large job of installing the rest of the wiring harnesses in the front of the car, not yet doing the bonnet as it is in temporary storage.

The three main wiring harnesses are in place here but not in their final positions.  It will be a significant challenge to get all the harnessed in their correct places, but this project is full of many challenges!

  The first part of the next post will give some details of the wiring installation.  I might be able to get this car together by the end of December if there are no more difficult delays.