Building your first street rod sure is a learning experience. Before I'd started my King-T I never imagined that it took so much time and effort. Well, I guess I had an idea of the time part of it, seeing as Jim spends most of his waking hours out there in the garage, but I never thought I'd be doing the same.
Yep, it's been a long road (in fact almost exactly a year of spare time tinkering) but I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And with Jim's help things have come together pretty darn well. With my '27 almost ready for the road the only large chore left was the upholstery. Seeing that we've handled every aspect of the cars assembly in our home shop we both figured we might as well give it our best shot as well.
Jim's pal Andy (Radi's Custom Upholstery) has our back; if we screw this up he'd just have to sew us up a proper professional interior--hear that Andy?
With this idea of homebrewed upholstery in our heads Jim and I turned to a proven source of high-quality hot rod interior material and pre-sewn seat covers--EZ Boy Interiors. Jim had used EZ Boy's products in his '27 roadster pickup a few years ago and was impressed with the workmanship and fit of the pre-sewn seat cover and pleated yardage they'd supplied for it, so it was a no-brainer to enlist their aid again for my car.
The neatest thing about working with EZ Boy interior kits is that all of their upholstery is made to order, giving you the freedom to choose the materials and the colors that you want. Their upholstery and material can be ordered in monotone, two-tone or even tri-tone color combos, and you can specify different materials to be used in those combinations, too. Plus, their styles can be adapted to work for whatever kind of seat you have, whether it is a tapered bench, a split bench, a pair of buckets or in my case, a straight bench seat with folding back. EZ Boy upholstery is stitched for each particular seat for a great fit.
The most important thing for the home installer to note is that EZ Boy seat upholstery is designed to be easy to install. All one needs to do is just remove the old seat upholstery, slip the new seat cover on over the frame and cushions, and attach it securely underneath the seat assembly with hog rings. The hog rings and pliers are included with every seat upholstery order. Speaking of ordering, besides checking out their website and choosing your material color and pattern all you need to do is tell `em the make, model, and year of the car that your seats came from, even if they are not original to your car or they're mismatched from front to rear. They've got literally hundreds of patterns and can sew up a cover that fits like a glove for nearly every make and style of seat you could imagine (even the Jeep rear jump seat Jim found for my car at the Pomona Swap Meet). Anyway, all went well (or as well as can be expected anyway) and I'm really pleased with how it ended up. I did learn a thing or two that'll help improve my results on the next one (yes, now that I've been bitten by the hot rod bug there will be another project in my future) but as I said I am happy with how it came out, and impressed that we were able to end up with some nice upholstery thanks to EZ Boy. They do make it pretty easy!
Having used EZ Boy kits in...
Having used EZ Boy kits in the past with great success Jim suggested we do the same with my T. He ordered up the exact same material color and design he used on his '27 roadster pickup. We opted for some matching bulk un-pleated material for the side panels.
You may recall from an earlier...
You may recall from an earlier installment of Hot Rod Girl where I made some interior panels out of a sheet of Polystyrene plastic. The three pieces ended up coming out pretty good and consist of both left and right panels and one for the T's single door.
Before preceding we again...
Before preceding we again test fit the panels and trimmed the edges just a bit more than we had when I first made `em.
Jim did the first panel while...
Jim did the first panel while I looked on. Once he had that one finished I had a good idea of how to precede so I jumped in and handled the others.
The only real problem we ran...
The only real problem we ran into was Jim's use of a thin piece of plywood for the turtle deck rather than the plastic we used for the other panels. The adhesive we used soaked into portions of the board keeping the material from sticking uniformly to the surface resulting in a couple of bubbles in the material. I pointed this out to Jim and he promised to fashion a new (hinged) cover out of plastic.
Next it was my turn. I grabbed...
Next it was my turn. I grabbed the right side panel and cleaned it up with a rag wetted with lacquer thinner since the panels had been sitting around and were kind of mucked up (Jim said the thinner would not only clean the plastic but open up its pores and help the adhesive to stick). I then laid the panel on the EZ Boy material and trimmed it so there was about 1 inches of overlap.