1953 Rover P4 75
August 2019 - Final touches
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Door wood trim
The previous owner had spray painted all the lovely door window wood trim a nasty dark blue color. A lot of paint stripper and elbow grease was required to strip the paint off the wood trim to prepare for refinishing. All of them had separation on the joints and required new joining biscuits. I used the wood paint stirring sticks to make new biscuits as they were approximately the correct thickness. To further reinforce the joints, a pneumatic pin nailer was used to drive pins through the wood joints.
Finished interior
Every single interior panel piece had to be reproduced out of 0.06" thick black ABS plastic and covered with upholstery fabric since the pieces that came with the car were not original and were all trash. Admittedly, the door panels did not come out as nicely as I would have hoped because it was a challenge to figure out how it was made in the first place when there were no good original Rover P4's near me that I had known about to look at for comparison. Online pictures were hard to interpret and the Rover service manual doesn't have this level of detail.
What I do know now and would like to note here is that the top of the door panels actually tuck in behind the wood trim. The upper "puffy" strip on the door panel is actually more rigid and sized precisely to just slide right under the door window wood trim and the upholstery fabric flattens out and tucks under the trim. What you see in the photos were not done this way, but looks close enough that I decided it was not worth the trouble to redo after I learned the correct approach. Also noteworthy to mention is the bottom portion of the wood trim is deeper on early P4's compared to later model P4's. I do not know the exact year when the depth changed, but I suspect it was around the 1954-55 timeframe when Rover restyled the exterior look. Also the pull handle located at the top of the doors are not original to early P4's including this 1953 model. Mine came with the handles so I put them back on not knowing any better before I learned about this detail.
Windshield wipers were one of the final remaining parts to be reinstalled.