Thanks Jan! It’s coming along OK so far (see comments below!)
Olecarguy, I’m with you on Princess Auto being a good friend. It’s not high end stuff, but it’s super affordable and perfect for light use by hobbyists like us. And I have to say that I have always been happy with their return policy if an item failed.
Progress has been slow for the past month as I have been working on clearing buckthorn trees (an endless task here), as well as getting the property ready for winter. I learned some hard lessons a while back after being caught by surprise by a sudden dumping of snow, so I now do the prep in September/October. Once I was ready for the white stuff I had a chance to get back to the interior work on the project truck.
While the interior is looking OK, I have learned a lot while doing it. The biggest lesson I have learned about making curved panels with masonite is “DON’T EVER DO IT AGAIN”! I used masonite on my last build, but those panels were flat. These curved panels take a fair while to bend into shape, and they will tend to uncurl with time. If you let them uncurl (for example you remove a panel but don’t reinstall it for a day) they can crack when you force them back into the tight curve. Thankfully this only happened on one small panel. If I were to start over, I would make the long drive to the city to pick up some 4x8 sheets of black ABS and use that instead (I wouldn’t even cover them with vinyl, I’d just be happy with a black interior). Alas, I already had the vinyl so I continued with the masonite & vinyl interior. I also finally got out to a cruise night (first one since covid started!) and saw some of the original cardboard interiors on ‘40’s trucks. If I’d seen these earlier I could have used a far simpler approach on my interior and saved myself a ton of work. But that’s the great thing about these forums. Not only can you see cool ways to do stuff, but you can also learn what not to do. So, enough griping about the course I took. Here’s an update on doing the interior with the masonite & vinyl method:
After finishing the headliner and the huge board behind the seat, I made templates for the doors, kick panels and A-pillars. I made the backer boards out of masonite for the kicks, and used metal for the A-pillars. I then cut out the vinyl for each backer board and got ready to do some glueing. Here’s a pile of templates, backer boards and cut vinyl:
Adding the vinyl was simply a matter of using spray glue on both the vinyl and the backer boards and sticking them together.
I was pleasantly surprised when I removed the headliner and rear cab backer boards prior to adding the vinyl. I had left them in place for about 5 weeks, and it appears that this is enough time for the curves to take a permanent set. My brother happened to be up at my place and he helped me out as it is nice to have a 2nd pair of hands when glueing down the vinyl. For a strong bond it is best to spray both the masonite and the vinyl, and once you start to lay the vinyl down you had better be in the right spot cuz there's no going back!
The glueing process was quite easy, and the only weird spot was the deeply dished areas in the panels that run along the tops of the doors. To get the vinyl to stretch and form properly, we simply hit it with a heat gun. I still had to add a couple of slits with a razor blade and do an overlapping tuck in order to get the vinyl to sit flat in that deeply dished area. My goal in this build is to make things presentable, so I think this will be OK. Here we are, getting the warmed up vinyl into the deep dished panel.
And here we are in the rear corner of the cab on the driver side, with the vinyl panels getting screwed down using trim screws:
There are seams between the various panels, and they would be a bit unsightly so I sewed up piping to use between the panels and to trim up the doors. I had lots of off-cuts of vinyl, and a couple of rolls of different sized cotton piping cord, so this step was easy. I bought an industrial sewing machine a few years back, and it is a very sturdy machine. The electric motor is massive and runs continually, and the needle engagement is done via a foot operated clutch.
It will sew through anything, however it has one big limitation: it is not a “walking foot” machine. This results in the folded over vinyl feeding through at an uneven pace, with a resulting twist:
To combat this I had to add a walking foot attachment to it (the big white thing that surrounds the needle in the pic below). As a result of the size of the walking foot attachment, when doing piping I can’t get close enough to the cotton rope that’s encased inside the vinyl. To get by this, I simply sew the vinyl without the rope inside, then use a wire to fish the rope through the vinyl and voila, my piping is all done (see pics below).
In spots where interior trim meets the piping, I just slid the cotton rope up the piping so that the trim piece would crush the hollow vinyl flat (rather than have the trim piece sit on the thick cotton rope):
Once installed, it filled the gaps between the panels, and dressed things up nicely (I also painted the trim).
There are a few things I would change next time. First, I’d use ABS plastic. I would also switch to a firm foam instead of the soft cotton piping rope, as the cotton seems to ripple when bent into curves (you can see this in the pics). I’d also switch to a thread that matches the vinyl, so that if it shows it won’t stick out as much as the white thread I had. The good news is that I can change the piping any time I want, as I have lots of vinyl offcuts on hand, and each piece of piping is simply held in place by 2 or 3 pop rivets.
The results so far are fine for my purposes, and it's been fun learning stuff about interiors. The remaining interior stuff should go quick, as I no longer have curved panels and long mating surfaces that need piping.
More to follow!