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I bought this '82 back in September of 2012. It had been sitting in storage for over 4 or 5 years. It was super clean and well cared for but it was in need of some refreshing. The first owner spent a fortune repainting it a pearl white over the original gold color back in '90. The interior was removed along with most of the glass. It is the nicest repaint I personally have seen on one of these cars. That owner also replaced all of the rubber door and trunk seals which are still in excellent condition. The front and rear bumpers were replaced with American International Racing fiberglass bumpers and OEM Porsche marker and tail lamps. Shortly after completing all of this work that guy went through a divorce and was forced to sell it before the divorce was finalized. If he did not his wife's attorney would be able to buy it for $1. Good times... So he sold it to the guy that I bought it from for a good price which then enabled me to buy it for an even better price. It had a full black leather interior, door panels included, that was decent but neglected and starting to shrink. The dash leather was pulling away and someone thought it was a good idea to cut through the leather arm rests to install some 3.5" square Boston Acoustic speakers. It also had a significant fuel leak that needed to be addressed. So this is where my project begins....
Last edited by RennPartsDirect; 06-04-2015 at 10:16 PM.
Here's a picture of the door panel with the speaker cut into the arm rest. This was disappointing to see because I haven't come across many 928s with leather arm rests that were in overall good condition. The dash was still in decent condition so I decided to leave it alone and buy a donor dash to play around with instead.
I started repairing the donor dash by filling all of the cracks and smoothing down all of the defects so the surface was nice and smooth...
Once this step was complete I started wrapping the dash with 3M carbon fiber vinyl. I've never done this before but it turned out pretty decent. Its been wrapped for almost 2 years now and it holding up very well. Lots of heat is needed to get the vinyl material to move around the curves. The vinyl is very forgiving but if you pull too hard it tears. Luckily I did not tear it on the dash but while I was covering the glove box I pulled it too hard and had to start over again.
Last edited by RennPartsDirect; 06-04-2015 at 10:17 PM.
As I was working on the dash and console I sent out the front seats to my reupholster. I knew I wanted to do something different from the original pleating that the seats had. They don't seem to hold up well at all so I didn't want to invest in redoing them with the same style. My upholster also agreed that it wouldn't be worth it to try to recreate the pleats. So we took it a totally different direction. I came across this Bentley interior that really caught my attention.
This is the inspiration for the seats. I really liked the square pattern with the double stitching...
Once we had the seats deconstructed I took the opportunity to reshape the foam to give the seats a more modern shape. We rounded off the upper corners and reshaped the front corners of the seat base and added some foam along the front center section.
Here's a picture of the center inserts before they were completely sewn together.
This is what the driver seat looks like now that its all back together. Notice the shape changes around the front and top. We also went with a full french stitching instead of piping. I don't care much for piping...
Looks cool. I like the updated seats as well. That diamond style is also seen in Aston Martin interiors and there's a guy that does interior upgrades for Nissan GTRs too.
I have very nice leather door panels with leather armrests from a '79 I bought that I'm not going to use. PM me with an email address and I can send you some photos. I haven't researched what they're worth yet, but probably won't be cheap.
Installed a custom made short shifter that I designed fitted with a 997 leather shift **** this past weekend. In a few weeks she will be getting new carpets and all of the roof panels recovered. I have a plan to gain more headroom too...
Installed a custom made short shifter that I designed fitted with a 997 leather shift **** this past weekend. In a few weeks she will be getting new carpets and all of the roof panels recovered. I have a plan to gain more headroom too...
What sort of boot are you going to use with the Short Shifter? Do the standard ones work, crunched up below?
The boot on the 997 **** is removeable by twisting the plastic ring at the bottom of the shift **** 90 degrees.
Pete-
You are correct. I was referring the the original 928 shift boot. The 997 **** that I am currently using has that plastic boot retention piece broken off so I will have to custom make something to keep the **** and boot connected. I guess I could try to reuse a 997 boot by removing the lower plastic piece and custom make something for holding it to the console. I have other donor 997 shift ***** to work with that aren't broken so that's definitely an option as I go forward. Thanks for making me think about again...
06-04-2015, 09:13 PM
1982 5 Speed Restyling Project
