Hi to Humber UK - Glovebox

My stats tell me that the Humber UK forum has discovered the Electric Vogue blog. Hi guys. You are welcome to leave comments (just be nice).

I painted out the inside of the glovebox liner last night ready to put a new vinyl bottom in it. I have used this Bristol vinyl paint for a few things now - great stuff!

I also installed the glovebox door's handle and lock and I'm trying to figure out what screws go where to hold the dashboard in the car.
I have to clip the rag stealer (poodle) tonight so not much will get done. We are pretty much on track to do the major test drive on Friday (if I take the day off which is on the cards).

Removing Contact Adhesive from Fabric

A few times throughout the Vogue restoration I have accidently smudged the fabric of seats or trim with contact adhesive and gone into a blind panic. Firstly, with vinyl, just wait until it's not runny (10 to 30 seconds) then rub it around for a little while with your fingers and it will ball and come off - usually with no trace at all.

Fabric is another matter, but I found out early on that Lacquer Thinners works perfectly. It doesn't appear to harm the fabric - at least automotive velour. Just a small slurp on a clean rag and gently wipe it off in the direction of the pile - in fact any direction and finish off in the pile direction. At one stage I was using spray adhesive (3M High Tack) and got quite a lot on one of the seats - the overspray looks like thin string. The thinners took it all off with no trace. I have always done this while the adhesive was still wet though. I don't know about other types of thinners - just lacquer.

Pinchweld and Seatbelts Finished

On Saturday morning I finished off the pinchweld at the front and finished the rear seat (fitted lower fabric covers to hide the frame). It took me the rest of Saturday afternoon to fit the rear seat and the front and rear seatbelts. This was a job I thought was going to be easy - and the rear seatbelts were pretty straightforward. A big thank you to "woody" from the AEVA forums who generously donated these seatbelts - they really set the Vogue interior off well.

The drivers side of the base of the rear seat showing the interface with vinyl and carpet.

The front seatbelts turned out to be a bit more difficult. I only had the shoulder bolts that came out of the car and these belts only had one rotating point - the other two were fixed and intended to be fixed securely in position (smaller hole) - not using shoulder bolts! My better judgement said not to use the wrong type of bolt - especially in a safety system, so a quick trip was made to Supercheap to buy some 7/16" high tensile bolts.

The front seatbelts in the Vogue get anchored at the rear two positions in the rear passenger footwell and are fairly obvious.

The decision then was whether to cut a slit in the carpet or punch a 22mm hole in the carpet (I just happen to have a 22mm punch) and mount the buckle above the carpet - we choose the latter (as you can see above). I figured that I'll have extra replacable carpet mats on top anyway. Complications started when the carpet would not sit correctly at the sides. I had to cut down two shoulder spacers to make regular spacers to get enough space for the whole thing to sit correctly. Somehow it took several hours.

LED interior light above seatbelt mount.

Lower section of pillar trim show interface with pinchweld, vinyl trim and sill guard.

Handbrake and cowl.

View of centre pillar trim showing colour change halfway down.

I was really hoping to drive  it on Sunday but we haven't finished the leather cover on the steering wheel and I spent most of Sunday fiddling with the dashpad vinyl in order to be able to fit the dash. I did manage to get the glovebox metal molding into position - held with 1/8" countersunk bolts instead of those cursed pop rivets that I had to drill out.

Other jobs done were to torque up the steering arm and hammer over the tab lock-washer, install the fuel filler and cover, install the internal lights and attempt to install my new rear vision mirror - no go. The new mirror has to sit a minimum of about 100mm off the windscreen. That's too far in an older car with a more vertical windscreen so I'll have to use my old mirror - so I have started to restore it.

Now for the door linings...

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.

Another Vogue Article

I found another great Vogue article. Among other things, this one explains why there was never a Mk3 Vogue Sports - they all were (the Mk3s that is)!
The Australian Humber Vogue
(Here is a Link to the previous Vogue article)

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.

Interior Lighting

Since I've owned the Vogue I have never had the correct dome light for the inside. Since they look pretty rubbishy anyway, and I would have had to cut a hole in our precious headlining, I had decided a couple of years ago to not have a centre dome light.

Instead I have two LED "running" lights on either side of the car mounted on the centre pillar just above the front seat belt mounting points. These are the same type as I used for the number plate light (whoops - I never posted that) except they have a chrome clip on trim instead of a black surround.

The number plate light.

It replaces the normal single bulb version that was getting very tired - the rubber was perished. I haven't shown it lit here but it puts out more light than the incandescant bulb did and lights the number plate really well. I have a few more of these LED lights - I intend to use them for engine bay and boot lighting.

I had to add a mounting point for the bottom screw (circled in blue) - that was a saga - I dropped one down into the passenger side pillar and took 45 minutes retrieving it.

They are held in place with Sikaflex and bear against the inner wall of the centre pillar panel when the light is mounted. The Sikaflex just holds them until the trim and light is installed.
The red arrows point at the mounting holes.
The LED lights have a 60mm lead on them that plugs into the connector in the centre pillar to make for easy installation.

Third Anniversary of Vogue homecoming!

Well it's the 20th July - 3 years since the Vogue came home from the respray and 43 years since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

Laurel (wife) convinced  me eariler in the week that pushing for the car to be drivable at 60-100km/h by today wasn't such a great idea because that would still leave lots of interior trim work to do. It would be a kind of repeat of the first drive in July 2011 with another year ( I thought weeks at the time) of work to do before I could really drive it - it's been frustrating.

So, I have been working away at the interior during the week but without any kind of panic about today. The interior lights are installed and all the vinyl trim is on. A little bit of rework to do there because I have to peel some of the padding off the back of the vinyl in some places (triple body metal seams) to allow the furflex to fit.

I'm ready to install the centre pillar trim which means that the furflex can finally go on. Funny that since I've owned the Vogue it's never had all the furflex fitted - it didn't come with it.
I think I'll have the furflex, carpet and seats in by the end of the weekend - let's see.

Last Pieces of Vinyl Trim Done

The final two pieces of vinyl trim are cut and glued, ready to go in the car. The butterfly clips that were used way back when we installed the headlining have been invaluable when gluing vinyl to corflute. (Underside shown.)

This is where one of these pieces gets fitted.

Interior Vinyl Trim Fitted

I spent most of Friday (last day of a week off from work) fitting the interior vinyl which covers the bodywork under the doors and the sides of the front and rear footwells.

Rear passenger side (left). I still have the trim for the vertical pillar in between the doors to fit. That piece is velour fabric and will go on when the furflex (windlace/pinchweld) is fitted.

Front driver side (right) with paint cans and wooden sticks holding glued pieces in place. You can see the driver side footwell trim piece on the transmission hump.

Driver side again with handbrake cowl in place and footwell trim installed. I have used velcro to hold the front footwell trim in place so that I can add wiring from the doors to main body easily (speakers, central locking etc,.). The grey wiggly carpet thing on the floor is underlay, cut to take out the bumps in the Vogue floor. The bumps were designed that way for some reason. Once the carpet goes in it should be a nice flat floor with a reasonably "plush" feel underfoot.

Passenger side carpet underlay with extra at the front to lift the carpet another 10mm.

Passenger side footwell trim.

I still have to cut two more pieces of corflute for above the footwell trim. Normally this is covered by the parcel shelf but I am not putting that back in initially - I'll velcro these pieces in as well. There is a bit of work in making a new backing for the shelf so I'm deferring it for now. The parcel shelf fitting also impacts on car radio fitting and the mounting of extra controls below the standard dashboard.

Hi to Vic from the Yahoo Humbercars group.

Drivers Seat Finished

We clipped up the upholstery on the drivers's seat  - a job we thought would take about an hour but took 6 hours. The mistake we made was leaving it so long since we did the passenger front seat.
This picture is just as we were fitting the lower part.

All External lights Installed

The rear lights are all back on the car. I used black mastik under the gaskets to ensure the weather stays out. The rear door handles are mounted and the number plates are back on. I just need the dashboard and a drivers seat.... and the driveshaft William reminded me. Oh, and a rear vision mirror... Anyway - nearly there. Sorry no pictures as we are in Sydney for a couple of days and this post is from my phone.

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.