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 |  | While the car was being bodily and structurally restored I was busy . . . Click the thumbnails (left) for detail pictures. I located a spare set of tatty (later style) DS seats (from Nigel Wild) and some useable door trim cards. The seats were eventually re-upholstered by my trimmer friend Darren Evans, in some very unusual fabrics which I found on E-bay. The replacement gold cloth door trims (thank you David Bourne) were used temporarily instead of the brown leather items, which were so distorted as to be beyond use. The leather (Pallas) seats were worn but useable during this period as well. My friend Ian Broscombe and I designed and created a settee (shock / horror) out of the rear seat during 2012 . . .
One of the main jobs I did myself was the stripping and refurbishment of the (replacement) seat frames. The front seat backs have been modified to accept (conventional) headrests, by welding on a section of frame from the top of some Ford Sierra seats - this has the effect of making the seat backs about 100mm higher, although they still look almost standard. Later in the 2012 season, the seats eventually came back from Darren Evans beautifully trimmed in the stunning pale green cloth I had found on e-Bay. Having thought they would take around 5m of fabric, he ended up using almost the whole 10m - these are much bigger seats than most modern cars! Luckily I managed to buy some more of the Mint Roma cloth for the door cards, which were the only major trimming job left to do.
One of the guiding principles behind much of the rebuild is to produce a car which can safely be used on a daily basis. Part of this rationale involves the fitting of 5 brand new seat belts (it was only fitted with hideous 2-point diagonal belts at the front originally). In order to fit inertia reels in the front and back, special mountings were fabricated by ace welder Ian Broscombe. The rear inertia reels are fitted on a special bracket attached to the inner wings in the boot, with a link bar running under the rear shelf to mount a central fixed 3-point belt and rear head restraints. 5 people will be able to travel at speed in (relative) safety - not the case with many 40 year old cars. Ian made an excellent job (without setting fire to anything) of welding in fixings for the front inertia reels at the base of the "B" pillars (much stronger than the thinner-metal chassis tops). This means that the neat little grey plastic trims had to be drilled, but the reels are better positioned, being tucked in tight to the pillar base. Similar mountings for the lap belt were welded into the vertical part of the chassis side box, and a decent-sized spreader plate was added to the centre mounts on the floor. Ian also fabricated an excellent rear seat belt mounting frame to my design. This serves several purposes: it provides a strong mounting for 3 rear belts (2 inertia and a central fixed belt which can be detached from a clever sprung pin on the rear shelf and tucked behind the seat base when not in use). Because the inner rear wings are fairly thin steel, the frame also takes all of the bending stress normally transmitted by separate brackets. And it also provides a secure fixing point for the two rear headrests now fitted to this car.
One small dilemna was the positioning of the front pair of speakers. I resisted cutting holes in the fairly straight gold cloth door cards* given to me by fellow Citroënist David Bourne, and I persuaded friend Ian to fabricate some neat steel panels to house the oval speakers. These have been trimmed in the brown vinyl and mounted in the back corners of the front footwell (just inboard of the chassis side members).
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