Cyber T-Returns: Interior

We're on the home stretch regarding our little Total Performance T-bucket project. While we wanted to just hit the streets in the little bugger, we fought off the urge to do so. We gave ourselves a little more shop time to install the interior properly so people wouldn't think we were absolute freaks.

In T-buckets past we've noticed their tendency to project their occupants quite high--like circus bear high. We're also a quite big lot over here and we knew we'd appreciate every last inch of cockpit room. As you may recall, we opted for Total Performance's form-fitted fiberglass seat kit from the get go. It replaces the conventional pleat-and-roll bench seat. It looks a bit swoopy for our rather conservative looking build, but the space tradeoff pushed us over the edge. We also opted to have Total install the interior wood kit so it made good sense to have them install the fiberglass seat kit while they were at it.

We're going to offer a little interior criticism, but before we do we'd like to commend some of the things we appreciated about the interior.

First off we really liked the side/kick panel kit that Total supplies. They glue loop-pile carpet to heavy cardboard panels, yet leave the sides unbound to make up for any inconsistencies. They also included vinyl welting to give the panels a more finished appearance against the body itself. The kick panels feature small vinyl-bound pockets that make perfect repositories for insurance and registration paperwork, but don't count on cramming anything else in there.

The carpet kit that Total supplies is pretty nice, too. They supply trimmed and unbound carpets for the transmission tunnel and firewall and a vinyl-bound insert to cover the floor and the vinyl edges give the boundaries a nicely finished appearance. Since Total can't anticipate what shifter or emergency brake a particular application will use, they leave it up to us, the installers, to trim.

The verdict is still out on the seats, however. During our buildup we heard the gamut of responses--things from "hey, those are pretty cool," to "uh, what are they?" We have to admit they have a sort of an Illudium Q36 Space Modulator feel to them that might suit a contemporary build a little better, but we gave the seats the benefit of the doubt: they give the car more interior space.

Simply put, Total molded a fiberglass panel that bonds with the fiberglass body. From there a thinly padded seat insert insulates the occupants from the unyielding fiberglass seat. At first glance the fiberglass construction and the rather sparse looking pads looks like it might feel a little, well, solid.

The fiberglass seat's biggest problem is perception, not padding. People associate heavily padded things with comfort and to an extent a pad or cushion is relatively comfortable because as it deflects under load and spreads bodily contact over a larger area. Instead of relying on foam to conform to the human form, Total took things a step further and approximated a human body shape into the fiberglass seat.

This isn't exactly new stuff; forward-thinking designers like Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen broke ground in the '40s with similarly shaped molded fiberglass chairs and faced the same perception dilemma. As people tried the designs, however, they accepted the svelte chairs as more comfortable than their overstuffed and heavy counterparts. The chairs ultimately withstood the greatest test: the marketplace. Countless companies tweaked the design and introduced their own--proof that the design worked.

About the only thing in question at this point are the seats' road manners. While a side chair remains stationary, a car seat undulates with the car over bumps and inconsistencies. The typical car seat also features springs under the more absorbent heavier foam padding that work in tandem to suspend and insulate occupants from bumps and jars. Whether the thin seat insert is enough to absorb road irregularities remains unknown. After all, we haven't driven the car yet. As for now, the seat feels pretty comfortable and it plunks us well within the body's confines--a pretty big factor considering how shallow the body is.

Enough on the seat treatise, however; we have to talk about steering wheels. A steering wheel is just as polarizing as the road wheels on a car. Wheels can make or break the look and have to match each other to a certain degree. To that end we needed something bare bones and minimalist to go with our bare bones road wheels--preferably something in chromed steel and rubber. It just so happens that we operate in proximity of one of the best-kept secrets in the old car world: Vintage Speed Parts in Rosemead, California. Jim Gordon keeps the flame burning that Gene Scott lit decades ago. He still manufactures much of the old-timey speed equipment that most people assumed no longer existed. He also reproduces the Bell and Cragar-style three- and four-spoke steering wheels. The big-car and sprint-car wheels at 17 inches are a smidge large for our cockpit, but the midget wheels at 14 inches are a beautiful fit. We ordered the classic four-spoker and bolted it to the Grant three-bolt adapter that Total Performance equipped us with.

Now we're just a stone's throw away from rocking and rolling! Our main man Jason Scudellari, or Installation Jason as we call him (well, at least that's the printable version anyway), is busy attending to the last minute tweaks and the break-in session on our little car. Within the next few months we'll confer over here and settle this bet we had going with Total Performance: was it really as easy as they claimed? For that we'll require some seat time. The best part is, even if we lose the wager, we still get to drive around in a bitchin' little car. Now that's what we call a hedged bet!