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I had been driving this car for about 8 years now with no carpets and
very poor seats. No door panels or anything else. It had a head liner
but was in very poor condition. The original material was still on the
back seat , but was not salvageable.
I found some door panels in a wrecking yard from a 68 American but they
were white, So I died those black. I had no luck finding the correct material
for the seats, so I decided to just go with black vinyl and make up my
own pattern. My friend Pauline was great at upholstery, and this suited
me just fine , because then only girls had worked on this car! I found
a stainless steering wheel out of a 1981 Jeep pick up, and was lucky enough
to be able to order a carpet kit from Canadian Mustang. I painted the
headliner and the package try satin black, (this really helped with the
visibility out the rear view on sunny days! I had saved up all the best
chrome trim I had from all the fancy Rouges I had parted out and put it
all on my Scrambler. When all was said and done, the car looked spectacular.
The same summer I decided to get the car painted. In plain white it fooled
all the kids, nobody new what it was. I had newer AMX rally wheels on
the car, glass beaded & repainted and with no beauty rings, It looked
very bossy! I finally felt like I had a show car!
All these Pictures were taken oct/96 by an Insurance appraisal rep.
You see here in B.C., you can get collector plates depicting it's value
as a collector car and cheap insurance, but it severely restricts the
use of the car. This was not an option for me. I licensed Russell as a
daily driver and after spending so much on this restoration, I had to
worry about how much this car was worth to the insurance company, since
selling it was never an option, I didn't concern myself with it's value
to a collector. My concern was, what if the car got stolen or crashed.
What was the insurance going to pay for it. So I hired an ICBC rep to
come out appraise the car for this purpose. Because all my slight modifications
were done with completely factory parts. I had not compromised the value
of it al all. In 1996, and with-out the proper A Scheme paint
colors, this car was appraised at $20,000 and would have been
more had it been red/white & blue! |