Kadett Chronicles 11: Progress report (4/29-5/5)

Since the car has been in the paint shop, we’ve been working on other details of the project.

We booked our hotel room and registered for the car show. So exicted!

Then we cleaned up the seats of the car with good old fashioned soap, water and elbow grease finished off with a high-gloss Armor All chaser. We let them dry in the sun and they look marvelous! We really saved ourselves some time by choosing to pilfer another Opel for these seats; they are in great shape!

And we finished up most of our shopping to get all the supplies we need now while we have the time to talk through options and whatnot. One of our big decisions was around door panel recovering. Let’s talk fabric, shall we?

I love picking out fabric. It’s like putting together a terrific outfit but without the stress of making sure you find it all in your size. The original door panels were covered in vinyl and they had that fake stitching pressed into the vinyl so that there was a 4-inch stripe created across the panel where the window crank is located. I can only assume it was an attempt to create some interest in an otherwise fairly basic model. So we decided on a dual fabric combination to enhance that feature even more.

Since the interior is black, we went with black vinyl. Again, we’re just breaking the mold here aren’t we? The vinyl we chose is not smooth; it has a slight texture to it. Frankly, it’s the kind of vinyl you’d see in cars that had vinyl in them. So it works.

The complimenting fabric we chose is baby blue – exact color of the car or darn near – with a small diamond pattern embossed into it. It’s outdoor canvas fabric so it’s heavy, durable and stain-resistant. And we gave it a spray of Scotch Guard just to be on the safe side.

We designed a pattern that is pretty close to the lines of the original door panels…ours just includes two colors. This is repeated on the side panels in the back seat as well. We also used the fabric on the rear shelf cover too. It has a large stripe of the blue fabric down the center of the shelf with the black vinyl on either side. This follows the line of the painted stripe on the hood so your eye follows from the exterior to the interior through the whole car.

Overall, we didn’t use much of the baby blue fabric which I think makes it seem all the more special. I had thought about tufting all this too, but the seats aren’t tufted so I decided to save that idea for another car.

Beyond that, The Gearhead found a web site that makes vinyl headliners on the cheap so we ordered that up in order to save ourselves a wee bit o’ time to focus on other things. The headliner also comes with matching black vinyl for the visors too. Bonus!