With the wheel decisions made we loaded the Ford back onto the flat-bed and drove up I95 to D.J.’s Interiors in Lake Worth, Fl where we met D.J. Bucell (fabrics and design) and Chris Byrd (audio/nav/cool gimmicks). Paint and wheels are obviously very, very important. The style and color of the car, and then the wheels, are what catch your eye. DuPont Root Beer, with the metallic gold jumping out of it in sunlight, will hit you like a hammer. Almost simultaneously you notice the wheels, and the “package” draws you over for a closer look.
You walk over, look inside and either say “oh wow” or you turn away because the paint and the wheels were simply wasted on an unplanned and/or poorly done interior. Planning and tastefulness don’t have to mean expensive---they mean “give it some thought before you start work.”
In my case, DJ, Chris and a few others looked at the paint, the engine.DJ got on a creeper to examine the undercarriage for about five minutes, came out, got up and said “what do you want to do, because this can really be something special.” I said “This is not just my car. This car will represent the passion that the owners of American Collectors Insurance have for the hobby and the knowledge that they bring when discussing the needs of our policyholders. I want this car to compete anywhere, with anyone, because it also, in fact, represents every one of our policyholders.
The very first decision, out of what was to become a million, was to use only Spinnyback Italian leather. It’s the finest leather you can buy and when translated from Italian to English means “empty wallet”. Spinnyback is used on almost every surface of the interior except the headliner (which is Canary yellow suede) and places where we needed the same or a complimentary color to the leather but in a different texture (which we’ll get into in the coming issues).
Next came the color choices, which we knew were going to be subtle, but the selection of which was far above my personal level of authority. So I did what all you big, bad, hairy-chested guys do when making car decisions; I took about forty samples home to my wife and she picked two colors in two minutes. Because we wanted a bright, rich interior we chose from the brown/tan side of the spectrum and came up with light caramel as the darker of two colors and light buckskin as the lighter. We (my wife) also made the decision to put the lighter of the two on the top of the dash, which is not what one would normally do. DJ wasn’t sure about that part, but as we saw the colors stitched together we all gave it a collective “wow”.
The carpeting was done in an exact match to the caramel color. A couple of paragraphs ago I mentioned that you should have a plan before you start and the interior shop is the first place where you will experience how expensive and time-consuming it is to not have taken the time to get a plan together and to have the body shop and the interior shop on the same page because from this point on, we are dealing with automotive artists and everything has to be “dead-on-correct” or it gets removed and redone.
The body shop had purchased and installed a foot-peddle type emergency brake, dash gauges, door handles, a clock and a few other items which DJ personally ripped out and tossed into a bin that was to become an expensive “junk drawer”. There was a lot of “going backwards to go forward”, which created both anxiety and lost time. I can’t stress enough the need to have a plan and have everyone agree to it before work is begun.
The next installment will detail the metal work for the interior, exterior and engine bay.