Front Door Liner Progress

The next stage in door liner manufacture is to trim around the edges allowed 20 to 25mm for the wrap-around gluing. I also cut around the clips to make gluing less messy. The messy holes for door opener and window winder started as beautifully punched holes but look worse for trimming to ensure that the liners fit nicely.

The orange lines are the direction that the clips were placed on the old door liners. That gives me a fighting chance to getting the clips to line up with the car door holes.

Next stage is snip 'V's into the fabric around corners and glue it down with contact adhesive.

The ever useful butterfly clips get used again. My modified surgical scissors are getting near the end of their useful life (unless I sharpen them) and have been invaluable for close-in cutting like the 'V's.

A few minutes after gluing the edges down, I remove the clips 2 or 3 at a time and give the edges a squish to ensure the fabric is secure then put the clips back on.

Thirty minutes to an hour later I do the same and only place a few clips back.

You can see my fancy 'V' cuts clearly in this picture.


 





  
Glue dry, clips off - ready for the wood trim and fitting to the car.

Blogspot collects statistics that the blog author can review. I find it interesting that the Feburary 23rd 2012 entry 'Seat Diaphragm Choices' is the most viewed post this week. I hope it helps other Hillman/Humber/Singer restorers out a bit. I'm happy to get comments - even on older posts.

Driver Side Front Door Liner

Due to the fact that I can not open the passenger side front door of the Vogue fully due to the way it's parked in the garage, I have started on the driver side door liner. I'll leave the passenger side for the moment.

The clips hold the fabric in the correct place for gluing once I measure exactly where the silver fabric should sit - 405mm to 410mm below the top of the ply. The 6mm foam and fabric are then glued on. I just have to flip it over and glue the edges down - about a two hour job involving lots of fiddly scissor work.

I noticed this picture of the dash in it's woodgrain surround had never been included in the blog.

This picture was taken shortly after the 20km drive around the "big" block.

Driver side Rear Door Liner Installed

That's both rear doors done.
It was a bit of a pain as the top left clip refused to clip into the door panel. The hole in the panel was on a detachable piece that just bent into the door when pressure was applied. I cut a small peice of wood and wedged it into the door behind the clip hole then dropped it to the bottom of the door and fished it out when the clip was secured.

Next is the front passenger (left) door.

Driver side Rear Door liner ready

Things haven't gone to plan in the past couple of weeks. I was hoping to have all the door liners on by now and to have bought the Vogue in to work for it's new tyres (over the road). A bout with a pinched nerve in my back and some family events have slowed things down a bit.

Anyway, the right, rear door liner is ready for the wood trim to go on.

The door has been fitted out so it may get the door liner fitted tonight (unless I'm clipping the rag stealer).

 The rag stealer doing her best to escape William's clutches and be the first dog in the world to be run over by an electric Humber Vogue (during the second drive).

Door Panel Fabric Ready

We had a busy non-Vogue weekend but somewhere Laurel found time to sew up the remaining three door panels (one is already fitted - see here). It's up to me now.

Rear Passenger Door Liner Installed

I installed most of the clips on the back of the door liner (I left the two centre bottom clips off as it doesn't need them) then cut small nicks in some plastic sheet and attached it to the door liner clips.

Then I assembled the rear door inside handle, lock rods and clips - I am not sure what I would have done if I didn't have a spare door under the house to refer to (I didn't pull the door internals out, the spray painter did so it was a bit of a puzzle which way to re-assemble the top rod).

This is the spare door under the house.


Then it took about 2 hours of fiddling just to get most of the clips to line up with the holes in the door - but it's finally on! We left about seven of the clips off as the 3 ply is a lot stiffer than the original card that Rootes used and it didn't need them - plus it made it a heap easier to get the liner on.

  View from inside the car.

I'm hoping that the remaining three will be easier.

Rear Door Liner ready for Installation

I finished gluing the fabric to the rear door liner last night.
We choose to have three 34mm strips of silver, pieced and top stitched. It took of lot of family advice to decide where to place the silver. The top part ends about 20mm under the lowest part of the armrest.

A minor mistake is that I should have inserted the 20 clips first. They go in from behind so that's not a problem but it would have been easier to place them in the correct position for the holes in the door without the fabric on the door liner.

Door Liners - last of the major work on Interior

Laurel sewed up the fabric for a door liner on Sunday so I bought some light-weight 6mm foam and, last night, glued it to the rear passenger side door liner. I left about 12mm at the edge with no foam. I also did not place foam under where the wood trim goes at the top.

I left it for a little while then lightly glued the fabric to the foam.

This is the first one so it's a bit experimental. I am not sure I used enough of the spray on glue. I'll see tonight. I don't want the fabric billowing out when I wrap it around and glue it (contact adhesive this time) to the other side of the panel.

Door Liners ready for fabric

I finished punching out the holes in the door liners and we laid one of the front and one of the rear door liners out to see how we would cover them. The rag stealer was nosing around.

Here is one without the black silhouette in the way.

The orginal liners were covered in red vinyl with vulcanizing in several strips under the armrest area.

We decided to do two or three strips of silver starting where the vulcanizing starts at the bottom but not going quite to the armrest (the two smaller holes through the vulcanized area). When we laid fabric on the liner it was apparent that, even though the fabric has a foam backing, that the backing was not thick enough - it felt cheap. I'll buy some 3mm foam backing to go behind the fabric.

At some point in the past two weeks I made the decision to use the constant current balancers on all the battery packs in the car, not just the ones that showed errors on the drive - I just didn't mention it here. I have been moving the balancer chargers from pack to pack as each pack got to 59 VDC (3.69 x 16). Every pack has taken more than two days to reach internal cell balance - thats about 9AH (for a 20AH cell pair). The packs were certainly not correctly charged. The last two battery packs are on the 180mA constant current balancer chargers now - nearly there!

New Door Liners

While I waited for the last 3 battery packs to balance I busied myself making the door liners. The old masonite door liners on the Vogue were water damaged (why do people insist on removing the plastic sheets between the door liners and the door panels and not putting them back), so it is necessay to make new ones.
This one is typical of the old door liners.

I have elected to use 3 ply as it is reasonably light and better when it comes to water damage (I'll be using plastic sheet under it as well).
First I acertained that the door liners on left and right sides of the car were mirror images of one another. Then I choose the best one, stripped off the vinyl and traced it onto my 3 ply - including the holes for handles, window winders, armrests and mounting clips. Then I firmly applied masking tape over the lines where I was going to use my old trusty jigsaw.

Once cut, removing the masking tape shows hardly any splintering.

I am lucky enough to have inherited (really) some hole punches. The door clips and armrests use a 1/2" hole. The only problem I had was on one panel near the corner it split the whole corner out. Some woodglue fixed that.

I had to bash out over 100 holes.
I now have four stamped 3 ply panels. Next comes a test fit (just to be sure the armrest, winder and door opener holes are correct) then the fabric covering.

Internal Front Door Handles Installed

We can now get out of the car.
The list a couple of posts ago has been updated.
Refresh your browser (Windows F5) if you have already visted that post.

Rear Doors Pinchweld Installed.

I ran the pinchweld down the front edge of the rear door openings last night. It took just under 90 minutes. So the rear is finished except for putting the seatbelts and seats back in. I'm on target for seats going in this week.

Interior Trimming - Pinchweld Installation

I finished and installed the centre pillar trim on Saturday.
I then spent an amazing amount of time trimming and gluing down bits that I hadn't noticed until I was ready to install the pinchweld (furflex/windlace). I bought the pinchweld from Basis in New Zealand.
This is the top part of the centre pillar trim showing the connector for the interior light and seat belt mounting hole. I hadn't glued it down at this point.

The lower part is in blue.

We changed fabric just level with the top part of the door linings (yet to be done). The top, grey fabric is the headlining fabric, the lower blue is the seat and door liner (yet to be done) fabric.

Having the pillar trim on allowed me to get on with installing the pinchweld - that's the stuff that clips around the body seams where the door closes. When we renewed the pinchweld on the Super Snipe we cut 45 degree angles on the right angle corners and I have never been that happy with the job. On one of the MGB forums someone had indicated that the correct way was to hammer the stuff into the corners and get as small a radius as possible - but it wouldn't be perfect. I cut of a piece and tried that and it wasn't very good. The metal parts of the pinchweld poked out through the fabric.

A note here that the cheaper plastic pinchweld is a LOT easier to install as it is quite easy to cut at 45 degrees. The "furflex" style that I have used is a metal spine with automotive fabric wrapping as you will see in the pictures.

So the technique I settled on was to unpeel the fabric partly, cut the metal at a right angle, then re-seat the fabric and cut a 45 degree angle in just the fabric. The result is great.
Here it is in picture form.
 
First spread the pinchweld a little and dig out the fabric - releasing it from the internal barbs.

Peel the fabric back to get it out of the way.

Snip of the metal part - I my case I need at least 12mm of fabric hanging over the end.

Re-seat the fabric (stuff it back in and ensure it gets snagged by the barbs).

Cut the fabric at a right angle 12mm from the metal (to neaten it up) then cut it at 45 degrees. MAKE SURE you get the right orientation of the angle. (Me, stuff it up first time? Nah!)

The final result - I had to lighten this picture up a lot to see the black which made the join look a lot worse than it really is.
One bit I didn't mention is that I used a permanent black marker to colour the grey lining of the fabric at the cut ends.

I haven't finished but I have made a good start and now have a system going. So far I have done both sides of the car, down the back and across the top of the rear doors.

Both Saturday and Sunday the temperature in the garage went from 12 degrees C to 14.5 mid-afternoon, then 12 again at the end of the day. It hit 12 at about 6PM both days- that's when I called it a day/night.

Front Outside Door Handles Installed

It may sound simple but I found a way to make it complicated.
It seems that you can assemble the locking mechanisms two ways.
I did the drivers side the wrong way. I had to dismantle the lock and re-assemble it. The first time I did this a year or so ago it took at least an hour. Last night it took less than five minutes - the things you learn.

This is the wrong way. The way you connect a fiddly spring inside the handle dictates which way the locking part pokes out when assembled.

 This is the right way.

 Final result. They are even connected to the locking system.

Driver's side.

The back doors will be much faster as there are no locks so no links inside the doors - and access is easier. The rubber pads are new (door handle to bodywork) from Sunbeam Specialties in the USA.

Both front doors are now closing pretty easily, the rears are still a problem but not so important. The rear door rubbers are tending to "catch" on the body work on the leading edge (lock side) of the doors, so I'll have to fix that somehow.

Door seals Installed

The weekend plus about an hour last night saw all the door seals installed. Not one of them shuts easily but I hope that all that is required is to re-adjust the hinges and latches. The spray painter had the doors perfectly lined up with the front and back wings which looked great, but the rubber stops them closing easily.

Another item that was fitted are the Vogue's "kewl" flesh tunnels (see two posts ago).
The screw on bit didn't fit but a little Sikaflex on the underside holds them in nicely and allows a tiny bit of flexibility should the posts end up on a slight angle.

Ear Metal for the Vogue

Here is my latest eBay purchase for the Vogue.

They are called "flesh tunnels" and are for folk who like to expand their ear piecings for decorative purposes.
Why do I want them. Well, I've always wanted to get my ears....NO - that's not the reason.

In this picture I have highlighted the hole where the internal button/post for locking and unlocking the Vogue door pokes through the upper part of the door. The post (not shown) is about 7mm diameter with a mushroom type head. The hole shown is about 10-11mm. (The outer weatherstrip doesn't look like that any more.)

The Vogue originally used a stainless steel "eyelet" of some form which are hopelessly unusable. I haven't been able to get eyelets anywhere near close enough to fit. I contemplated getting some machined up but on my eBay searches for eyelets, ear decorations kept turning up - it was a sign!
I bought four for under AU$5 so if the inner diameter isn't large enough - not too much lost.

The lower flange on the flesh tunnels unscrew so fitting should be easy.

(Added this image later - 15th Jun 2012)

One Finished Armrest

Look Ma - no wrinkles.
Three more to go.
It took about an hour to do this one. I avoided getting any glue on the foam underneath so it's only glued to the flat metal base of the top part. That way it can be easily recovered in the future. It took a lot of patient stretching of the material and 'V' cuts to get it to fit perfectly.

Armrests as internal door pulls

The Vogue originally had little chrome handles mounted just under the door wind-up windows that were used to pull the doors closed - as in this before picture.

Note that the door section above the wood trim is black vinyl. When we had the Vogue resprayed we chose to have this section in the same metallic blue as the lower section of the car - no vinyl. That would mean that every time someone closed the door, they would scratch the paint with their fingernails. Since the Humber Super Snipe (my other car) does not have these handles I decided to leave them off the Vogue as well, so the holes were filled prior to painting.
Now to the point! The armrests will be used to close the door, same as the Snipe.

This is the red vinyl armrest. The vinyl has shrunk a fair bit.

 The upper and lower section of the armrest are held together like a clamshell with two screws.
 When you remove the screws, and peel off the red vinyl you are left with this upper section. I had to be careful not to damage the foam too much or the new velour would appear "bumpy".

 We have chosen to use the blue velour on the armrests as it will be a little bit more forgiving of dirty hands. Here is my blue velour - cut to shape.

The lower section of the armrest is black plastic and while all of them are is pretty good condition, they have become slightly transparent so I have coated this first one with a vinyl paint on the inside. I came across this vinyl paint when my daughter needed some cheap black shoes of a certain style for waitressing and she could only buy white shoes. The paint is water based and intended for vinyl, leather and plastic and sticks very well. The inside of the armrest will be a pretty safe place for it.
Pictures coming...