As you can see from this picture, the interior is a combination of MG colors Autumn Leaf and black.

The interior was originally all Autumn Leaf. When the original carpet was worn out, Mom & Dad replaced it with black. Since the car is now in my hands and since they had already started the conversion to black and since the interior in general was looking a bit rundown..... I'm taking a few liberties with the car to dress it up a bit.

I was never particularly fond of Autumn Leaf to begin with. So black was my choice of colors. I went shopping to a fabric store one day with some ideas in mind. I wanted a patterned fabric for the doors and some other panels and vinyl for the panels that would most likely see a bit of abrasion. Here's a picture of what I chose for the materials.

The top part of the pic shows the vinyl and the lower part of the pic shows the fabric. Due to the limitations of my video capture card and camcorder, the fabric doesn't really look quite like this. The colors are really more like a couple shades of gray and some black.

Most of the panels are the original vinyl covered panels with the vinyl removed. They are made from a masonite hardboard type material. If the panels are damaged, the the original panels could be used as patterns for tracing and cutting new panels from 1/8" hardboard. Fortunately, all my panels were in good condition. I removed the original covering and sprayed them with 3M Super 77 aerosol adhesive and placed them, sticky side down, on 1/4" polyester quilt batting. The batting was then trimmed to the perimeter of the panel. The batting side of the panel was sprayed with adhesive. The sticky side of the panel was then aligned with the grain pattern of the fabric and pressed down to stick it together. The fabric was trimmed to allow an edge to fold over to the back of the panel. The edges were glued and it was all allowed to dry.

This table shows what pieces were covered with which material:

If I have enough material left over, I plan to upholster the trunk too.

Here's a pic of a recovered door panel.

This is what it looks like on the back side. For the window crank hole and the door pocket, the fabric was cut, folded back into the hole and glued.

The holes for the door pull handle screws were burned through with a nail held in a vise grips pliers and heated with a propane torch. Because the fabric is polyester, the red hot nail sealed the edges of the holes to keep them from fraying.

This picture shows the panel held up to sunlight and shows how neatly the holes are burned through. The 4 shadowy holes are the holes for the bolt heads for the window regulator mechanism.

The "burning the holes" trick is a variation on the technique I read about on another webpage. On that webpage, they used a soldering pen to burn the material. Using a nail in a vise grips heated with a torch saved my soldering pen from getting mucked up with burnt plasticky stuff. By burning the holes you can "cauterize" the holes so that the threads of the fabric and padding don't snag and twist up around the screws when they are inserted.

NOTE: I had hoped that the interior door pull handles from earlier Midgets would fit in a '76 1500. That was not to be the case. The pulls from earlier Midgets have the mounting holes closer together. I guess I'll have to use the less attractive (in my opinion) later model door pulls.

This is one of the rear side panels. You can see that the holes for the 3 bolts that fasten the convertible to frame were also burned out with a hot nail.

This is one of the kick panels from the footwell area. It was covered with vinyl and the screw holes were nail burned. The larger holes (white arrows) are for the door check strap and the smaller holes (red arrows) are for the screws that fasten the panel to the chassis and the glove box screws.

To be continued.........