body and interior Blue Leather For Seats

[Stuart]

Looking for a blue leather to match the standard blue on a door card for a 72.  I have 2 BMW and 3 Mercedes leather samples coming.  Any one used anything else?

 

Thanks

Stuart

[LarsAlpina]

Me did.

 

No help for you though, german respectively italian material. Too expensive to import and like Esty wrote short time ago good US materials also on the market.

 

2000CS:

 

 

Regards, Lars.

[Hans]

World Upholstery. Have your credit card ready.

Hey Lars, where did you find those CS door panel pockets?

[LarsAlpina]

Well,

 

owner fetched the car from southern France near Nice for an "easy" restauration. Good weather with much sunshine - much more then normally in Germany at least. But there´s also rain! If all door gaskets are gone or hard as a rock, that´s not good for the doorcards:

 

 

Don´t have a machine to reproduce and form the pockets from original wood-paper mixture. So I had the choice to laminate from fiberglass or to form out of sheet metal. As I´m more used to metal work (our german old BMWs mostly deal with rust problems as we´ve got weather comparable to northern US) I chose this option.

 

BTW much more rust on this 2000CS than owner expected. I told him before but he didn´t believe me. These Karmann bodies do really have virtually no anti-rust protection from factory on, with no immersion bath in Osnabrueck there is barely one single drop of paint inside the bodies cavities. Always reminds me of old Alfas or Fiats - "Already rusts in brochure" was an old saying about those in Germany. Even the window frames front and rear on the CS showed rust holes in the end.

 

Regards, Lars. 

[Hans]

Karmann invented rust and licensed it to FIAT. A lot of metal went into mine.

Did you keep the mould for those pockets?

Sorry to hijack this thread!

[LarsAlpina]

No moulds, just hammered by hand looking and measuring at the old originals. And a lil´ bit of fantasy of course as the originals were a bit deformed.

 

Used the upper chrome trim and photos from sales brochures as some kind of reference. Sharper edges at the front did not work out well first. Had to cut, make two separate pieces and weld together finally.

 

Somehow like self-making rocker panels for 02 for just partly repair with that f...ing cornery front thing for the A-pillar. Just a bit bigger though. Don´t like much to cut original metal out of car if still solid. Unless you get NOS body parts with production date before mid of 80s (and those are rare and horribly expensive meanwhile) you always have to deal with fitment issues with the newer panels. To make those fit consumes equal or more time as to hammer yourself from sheet metal for only partly repair.

 

Regards, Lars.