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 |  |  | Other areas of the car needing attention were interior trim (other than the seats), and the dashboard. Click the thumbnails (left) - they are in roughly the right order. The first job on the list was trimming the inner and outer sills, which I quickly realised meant carefully removing all 4 doors. I cut the main internal side-member sections from some very nice dark green Hardura I had purchased from Woolies Trim (they are very helpful and will send samples), using as a template one of the original grey trims I had retrieved from Graham Morton, who had stripped the car originally for its structural restoration. Stupidly, I chose a weekend when I was on my own to glue these in place. Using contact adhesive, a piece of floppy Hardura over 2m long is not easy to handle . . . This was followed by the aluminised vinyl outer sill trim - which required the removal (along with their fiddly internal springs etc.) of the strange curved stay mechanisms for the rear doors - which in turn meant removing the sill closing panels (easy enough, although re-fitting them wasn't quite so easy). Before gluing the covering on the outer sills, I marked up and drilled the holes for the clever stainless steel and white rubber finishers which I had previously cleaned up, along with several other white or grey grooved rubber moldings, including the very long roof rail cover and the split tubes running around all the door seals. I found that warm water, a little washing-up liquid and a fairly worn-out Spong pan-scourer did the job well. While the doors were off and the seats out I carefully pulled off the remaining bits of original grey trim from the front and rear seat boxes. These were cleaned in a similar way and stuck back in. I thought about renewing them with the green Hardura, but the condition was OK and the combination of colours is quite pleasing. I've re-used the original grey floor carpets - they are a bit worn; so I've now fitted over-mats made from Ikea door mats . . .
The pressed cardboard interior trims on the "C" pillars and above the back window normally become damp and distorted; so using lots of trial-and-error I re-made the panels from malleable aluminium which is perfect for 'pushing' into the difficult shapes needed. My fantastic E-bay-sourced (wish I'd bought more at the time) brown hessian-pattern vinyl now covers these, the "B" pillars, and parts of the dashboard. I managed to find a pair of Series 1 BX interior lights from Malcolm Lockwood, which I've set into the "C" panels.
Dashboard removal is near impossible without first taking the windscreen out, and it seemed unwise not to remove the screen lower seal and rail - which I repainted (along with various other details) in brown to match the whacky vinyl which now covers the dash top. Because the vinyl has a bonded foam/cloth backing I had to cut back all the dash top panel edges to stop them 'bulking up' and preventing a good fit. ID and DS dashboards from the 60's are made up of a myriad of pieces, and because I wanted to polish the delicate aluminium trim behind the steering wheel the whole column had to come out - so that got painted too! I'd bought the rusty remains of a dash from a LHD '67 Pallas, but decided against converting to the 'swoopy' DS-type because I was short of several vital parts like the glove box. But it did give me a spare set of switches etc. - which I cleaned up to use as 'extras'. We fabricated a nifty shamfered panel to house the new american radio I'd bought - complete with iPod + power connections in the glove box.The main 2-tone panels were painted to match the bodywork, and the whole lot was very carefully reassembled. Before putting the dash top and windscreen back in, the lower screen seal and rail were refitted using a non-setting guttering mastik to prevent any chance of leakage.
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