I know I’m years away from needing to make final decisions but I’ve been thinking of interior colors.
I’m pretty sure that if I keep stock style seats for I’ll just end up going with Project Żuczek I’ll end up going fully with a Sewfine interior. Hell, even if I end up changing the front seats to something roomier I’ll likely stick with Sewfine for the rest.
I will likely have a dark interior, with either black as the primary color and a secondary accent or a dark grey primary and an accent. Those 2 combinations will work with every possible exterior color deco I have in mind so that they are safe bets. The secondary color would likely also be used as a trim color on the exterior to bring the inside and outside together.
What I’m really not sure about is fabric.
Now I have a soft spot with vintage cars having vinyl. There’s nothing more amazing than that vintage VW vinyl smell. Of course, with a total restomod, there won’t be any original materials left so it loose that smell completely.
And I’m also into durability and dirt/stain resistance. I really despise the modern velour(ish) headliners. The Forester headliner is filthy and picks up every little piece of dirt and trying to clean it just smears the dirt around. It sucks.
But I have no experience with tweeds.
Sewfine has quite a few.
I think I could like tweed, especially since this car will be a summer car and I’m willing to give up my childhood love of burning hot car seat vinyl. (Oh… jumping in your parents’ cars in the 70s and having that burning hot vinyl stick to your leg skin… what a memory!)
I’m thinking that if I go with the metallic purple exterior, that the black tweed with a purple accent inside, or even the charcoal grey, would really work together in that Transformers Shockwave look I previously wrote about a few weeks back.
Hell, even a hint of a dark red or orange-red might go well as a 3rd color somewhere.
I would hate to choose fabrics and colors from JPG images on a non-color managed display.
I mean, they have this amber tweed that could really be a nice as an accent too. But I’d really need to see a sample first. I think the purple and amber, in theory, could make a nice pairing. And the black in amber would as well, depending on the paint color. (Gotta take the interior painted parts of the dash, doors, pillars, etc. into account.)
Sewfine has quite a few vinyl types as well. And the fact you can get a refundable sample box really helps.
The seat decision really needs to occur too, which will help determine vendor. Or at least I think that will probably be the way.
If I keep a stock seat (even retro from an older Beetle) I can probably go with any vendor with VW patterns. Going to a non-stock front seat setup could throw this to multiple vendors, or having to get yards of the fabric to have someone locally do the front seats to match. Not something I really want to do.
In one of their sample galleries of a featured 53 Beetle they have a not-so-great pic (above) of the front. Yeah, all of 1953 is totally sucked out of this car, but I like the look of the seats and door cars (and steering wheel). I like the seat frames being a different color too.
That’s one of the great things with shifting to a 1302 for a project, you can basically look at pics any standard Beetle from any year to get an idea of how it could all go together.
Given the simplicity of vintage car door cards, I could also try and create those as total customs. I bet it would be fairly easy to do, at least to mock up 1 full door to see if I could do it well enough to do the whole car.
Oh. And another thing.
I want to use the same materials (carpet, fabrics, colors, etc.) to create a custom cover set for the trunk to hide everything.