Tallulah Beetlebug

Archive: March 2023

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The New Padded Dash Has Arrived

As we saw last time, I had to order a new padded dash and it has now arrived. The new padded dash seems to be very high quality, metal reinforced, and made in USA, which means different things to different people (re: PT Cruiser). It is not an exact match to the one that came...

All Hopes (Padded) Dashed

I have been putting off recovering this padded dash for a while. Knowing that I tend to overthink things and that my man hands aren't well suited for this type of project, I asked my sister to help. She is super crafty and much better at those types of things than I am. I had...

Just a quick one

One of the pile of interior tidbits I ordered was a new gas pedal rubber (jbugs link). The old one was in pretty bad shape. On my way out to the grocery store, I decided to pop in and replace that real quick-like. I struggled a bit at first, trying to figure out how the new pe...

Rear Seat Part 2 - The Backening

In what I promise is the last post about refinishing the seats, we move on to the rear seat back. Disassembly It is closed back, kind of a fiber board material with a vinyl coating on the outside. There are metal trim pieces screwed on to the top and bottom edges. They unscrew...

Refinishing the Rear Seat

The Spring Tease has passed and we're back into cold, wet weather, so I moved the seat refinishing operations from the front porch to the basement. I laid down a silver Harbor Freight tarp to catch some of the mess and over spray and began the process of refinishing the rear s...

Recovering the Dash Pad

It's Saturday morning. Too early and too cold to be outside working. Luckily, I brought lots of projects inside with me after tearing the dash panel and rear seat apart. I have just enough of this roll of vinyl patch kit (Amazon link) left to recover this crumbling foam rubber...

That escalated quickly

As mentioned in previous posts, I purchased this roll of self-adhesive vinyl to patch and refinish the seat covers. My plan was once finished with the seats, to take the rest of the roll and recover the crumbly foam rubber dash panel. A new one is around $300 and I'm far too c...

Moving on to the back seat

I'm still waiting for the roll of high density foam (Amazon link) to arrive for the back seats, but it's a beautiful day, so I decided to get some prep work done. As you can see, the back seat covers have similar issues to the front. At one point in the past, I leaned in throu...