Model T Upholstery - Part 1 [0:59-5:59]

So, I'm coming to you today from the basement of my house from my woodwork shop, where it's relatively warm. There's a winter storm raging outside. I live in Ontario, Canada, and this past weekend, Ontario was the coldest place on the planet. Anyway, it's still pretty cold, it's windy and snowy, and I'm happy to be working down here in my basement. Tonight, it's supposed to get down to 22 degrees below freezing, so yeah, there's that. Anyway, that's why we're here in the woodshop, rather than out in the garage. Now, this project, as all projects, was never meant to be that big of a deal, but of course, as a wise man once said, it's never easy. Now my goals for this project are not to be entirely purist by any means. I'd like the new upholstery job to look authentic, but it doesn't have to be exactly correct. And I'm in no rush, it doesn't matter how long this takes, really. I'm going to start with the seat cushion, and then I'll tackle the much more difficult seat back inside bolsters later. My 1926 Ford Model T was the first year of what Ford called the Improved Ford, and it was a redesign trying to save the brand in the face of increasing competition from his rivals. The Improved Ford was considered to be an all-steel construction. It still had some wood, but it was mostly steel, and it was a new body style, a little more sleek. It started to look a little bit more like what the Model A was going to look like, and he continued to do cost-cutting to be able to sell the car at an attractive price. Now the interior in the 1926 and 27 was even simpler than in previous years. Now you didn't expect to get through one of my videos without a little bit of a history lesson, I don't imagine. So let's start by talking about the upholstery that was used on Ford's open cars through the years, and then we'll zero in on what the upholstery was like on my car in 1926 run about. We can talk about where I'm going to try and match that aesthetic and where I'm going to cheat a little bit. So when the Ford Model T was first introduced, the open cars were all leather, and they were all diamond tuffed, diamond tuffed seat bottoms and seat backs, and the seat backs wrapped around to the side bolsters. Sometime in the 1914-1917 time period, the seat backs were changed from a diamond tuffed to a vertical pleat with buttons, and this theme with the straight pleats would continue. After 1917, they've even changed the seat bottoms to be straight pleats with buttons. At about the same time, there were also transitioning from leather to an imitation leather. I'm going to call it vinyl, but it wasn't vinyl, I know vinyl wasn't invented yet, but that's what I'm going to call it just because I'm used to using that term. It was a proxylin material, nitrocellulose, which was kind of like a lacquer that they infused into a tough cottonback. It was very much like vinyl as far as I can tell. Now in the mid-20s, some of the cars started having the buttons removed as well, so those seats were just purely straight pleats. Now Ford made cars in many different factories. There were factories in the US, factories in Canada, and overseas, and by no means are my dates and model changes, universal across all the different factories. I'm just kind of giving you a sense of how the design of the interior changed over time. Now we get back to the 1926-27 model year, the improved Ford. This is like my car. You'll find that some photos of the old interiors on these cars showed buttons on the vertical pleats and some didn't. So it's a bit haphazard.