Hot Rod Restoration: Overall Assessment of Interior

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Joel Jones, I own Jonesy's Inc., a company that specializes in auto restoration and customization. Now we're going to talk about the interior condition of the '65 Suburban. I want to point out that this is an original steering wheel and it's in surprisingly good shape. There is a small crack right at the hub, but the horn button is in good shape and the, the feel of it is in good shape. It's not badly cracked. There are after-market wheels available so if you just want to buy a new steering wheel, you can, or this can actually be repaired and this steering wheel can be painted and have it look like brand new. You want to look at the gauges, and the rest of the interior of this vehicle. There's after-market pieces available, I mean the sky's the limit on what you can do with the interior of these vehicles. All these switches, you want to, this is the wiper switch, you want to feel how they work, headlight switch feels pretty good. This has a manual transmission, if you're doing a restoration or custom vehicle, you don't have to, you're not limited by what the vehicle has in it currently. This is a four speed, manual transmission out of a truck. Most common is you would convert over to a automatic transmission; it makes it more fun to drive, it's easier. Okay, I want to point out one thing that this vehicle has. It has a, the original name plate. All vehicles have stamping plates all over them. This one has the GVW of the vehicle as well as the horsepower rating of the original engine. If you're trying to bring this vehicle back completely to stock, everything needs to match that plate as well as the other VIN number plate. So what you would want to do is you'd want to take a digital photograph of that plate, take it back home, analyze it, and then do some research on whether or not engines are available and whether you want to bring it back to stock or customize it. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about interior and what you can do with some of these classic cars on your interior. On this vehicle it still has the stock front seat configuration, it's a split bench design and the reason it's a split bench design is so that this passenger side seat will fold forward to allow entry into the rear. You need to keep in mind that you don't have to keep the stock seats, and a lot of times people put in late model seats out of Suburbans, late model Tahoes, something that has leather that's a really nice, heated, power adjustment seat, and if you're going to do that, you need to make sure that you allow for entry into the back seat. The easiest thing to do is obviously to have these front seats re-upholstered. Then you also need to decide on what kind of carpet kit you're going to use, if you're' going to keep the stock rubber floor mat, or you're going to take it to an upholstery shop. The upholstery is one thing that you can really go extravagant on or you can try and save a lot of money. The other thing that you need to keep in mind when you're designing your interior, is what you're going to do about stereos. You obviously want to have some kind of a stereo in this vehicle and so you want to plan out where your speakers are going to go and how the speaker wires are going to get there, and then you're going to want to build interior panels that hide those speaker wires and allow the speakers to function properly. So you want to disperse it around the vehicle. This Suburban is a really, really large open cavity and the sky is the limit in terms of, of what you can build in here. You can put large sub-woofers in the back, you can put six speakers, you've got tons of room to mount amplifiers. You can build custom headliners for it, it has, have consoles in the top, let your imagination be your guide and also stock interior kits are available to reproduce exactly the stock interior. One thing I want to mention is in a lot of older trucks and Suburbans, they utilize wood for their bed surfaces and if you're producing a show truck or even a really nice truck, the bed is one place where you can really show off wonderful woodworking skills. You can stain it any color that you want. I seen a lot of dark, I've seen a lot of light wood colors and it's one place where you can really put your own personal flair in."