Caradise Project Car Part Deux: Interior Overhaul

We have started working on our new project car: Project Gwen and we had to take care of some urgent things.

This poor car looks like it spent a lot of his life outdoors, and with some careless owners to boot. It will need a repaint for sure. But we are saving the big ticket items for later. First, we put new low-price tires right away. Why? Because the tires it had were bordering on 12 years old and were showing signs of dry rottenness. Pure danger here. We also ordered some OEM lug locks that failed to work, so the tire shop had to do the tried-and-true method of hammering a socket to remove those.

Then we did rear brakes and rotors, and in the front, resurfaced the rotors. The brake pads were still ok. Saving some money.

However, as mentioned, the interior was very, very tired and as many of these cars tend to do, the front seats had started to disintegrate. The hood insulation was shredded and the doorcards and window weather trim strips had also started to lose paint and split up.

So we went to work over the holiday weekend, first, an easy project, replace the hood insulation cover. These parts don’t exist anymore new, so I had to go to a Junkyard where I found a decent one, that could be refurbished with some heat resistant tape.

After that, we gained confidence to address the seats. An old forum post seemed to indicate Nissan 350Z leather seats could be a suitable replacement, with some ‘minor adjustments’ but that was a lie. Well, not quite.  I found some cheap 350Z leather front seats in the color I needed. They were indeed visually a great match and had the same color and also had perforated leather. They did fit fine in the car on both sides. However, the rails proved to be wider and longer than the 3000GT ones, and both seats needed power to move or recline. The driver seat had a similar power plug, but on the passenger side, all I had was the amp to feed power on that side. And I don’t have a way to make the seat rail adapters and I suck at splicing cables. Despite being a good visual fit, I abandoned that plan.

However, luck smiled upon me, with a set of seats I found in FB marketplace, but it demanded a 16-hour drive to Vegas and back, where someone was selling a complete set of leather seats for $500 (Mind you, a good set of seats on Ebay starts at $1,500 at least) and the color was tolerable. I also learned too late than the backs of the rear seats of the Spyder are NOT the same as the regular coupe model. But didn’t matter, I had great looking OEM seats after doing the round trip to Vegas and back.

After that, I got home and the garage sure turned into an illegal Car upholstery business. I had three sets of leather seats all over the place. I needed to move the seat belt latches from the old, busted seats to the newly acquired seats, and try to sell the Nissan 350z seats, while I conditioned the new set of seats & transfer the seat belt latches.

The old seats were in bad shape, ripped and rock hard in some places and upholstery places charge an arm and a leg around here. I don’t like the custom covers sold, as the fit varies, so they had to be replaced.

After a day of work, the next day we were ready to place the new seats back into the Spyder, this is a two man job that I was doing by myself. The challenge is to align the rails, as the mechanism would constantly move and shift the rails while using one hand. Finally, I used a few tools to block the movement of one rail while setting the other in place and that worked. It was a 90 degree day and I got drenched in sweat after, but mission accomplished! The seats were from a 1997, just a tad chunkier but they all work and have no rips at all.

On our next installment, we’ll tackle the door cards, the window trims, and see if we can remove some sore spots of the paint. While we contemplate where to get the next pile of money needed for some preventative but desperately needed fixes.  Stay tuned and come with us as we get Project Gwen completed.