Well, it's now April 2012; so my promise to add the next ID19 page "over the next few months" has over-run a little . . . but the car has been safely tucked away over the winter months while most of what follows took place, and I'm quite proud that a substatial part of it was done by me - with a little help here and there of course. I know my limitations . . .

I think the first job on the list must have been trimming the inner and outer sills, which I quickly realised meant carefully removing all 4 doors. I cut the main internal side-member sections from some very nice dark green Hardura I had purchased from Woolies Trim (they are very helpful and will send samples), using as a template one of the original grey trims I had retrieved from Graham Morton, who had stripped the car for its structural restoration. Stupidly I chose a weekend when I was on my own to glue these in place. Using contact adhesive, a piece of floppy trim 6ft+ long is not easy to handle . . . This was followed by the alumised vinyl outer sill trim - which required the removal (along with their fiddly internal springs etc.) of the strange curved stay mechanisms for the rear doors - which in turn meant removing the sill closing panels (easy enough, although re-fitting them was a nightmare).

Before gluing the covering on the outer sills, I marked up and drilled the holes for the clever stainless steel and white rubber finishers which I had previously cleaned up, along with several other white or grey grooved rubber moldings, including the very long roof rail cover and the split tubes running around all the door seals. I found that warm water, a little washing-up liquid and a fairly worn-out Spong pan-scourer did the job well. While the doors were off and the seats out I carefully pulled off the remaining bits of original grey trim from the front and rear seat boxes. These were cleaned in a similar way and stuck back in. I thought about renewing them with the green Hardura, but the condition was OK and the combination of colours is quite pleasing. I've re-used the original grey floor carpets - they are a bit worn; so eventually I'll have some fitted over-mats made (possibly out of sizal or similar)

One very important area of modification mentioned previously is seat belts. My friend Ian Broscombe made an excellent job (without setting fire to anything) of welding in fixings for the front inertia reels at the base of the "B" pillars (much stronger than the thinner-metal chassis tops). This means that the neat little grey plastic trims must be drilled, but the reels are better positioned, being tucked in tight to the pillar base. Similar mountings for the lap belt were welded into the vertical part of the chassis side box, and a decent-sized spreader plate was added to the centre mounts on the floor. Ian also fabricated an excellent rear seat belt mounting frame to my design. This serves several purposes: it provides a strong mounting for 3 rear belts (2 inertia and a central fixed belt which can be detached from a clever sprung pin on the rear shelf and tucked behind the seat base when not in use). Because the inner rear wings are fairly thin steel, the frame also takes all of the bending stress normally transmitted by separate brackets. And it also provides a secure fixing point for the rear headrests now fitted to this car.

The pressed cardboard interior trims on the "C" pillars and above the back window normally become damp and distorted; so using lots of trial-and-error I re-made the panels from malleable aluminium which is perfect for 'pushing' into the difficult shapes needed. My fantastic E-bay-sourced (wish I'd bought more at the time) brown hessian-pattern vinyl now covers these, the "B" pillars, and parts of the dashboard. I managed to find a pair of Series 1 BX interior lights from Malcolm Lockwood, which I've set into the "C" panels.

Dashboard removal is near impossible without first taking the windscreen out, and it seemed unwise not to remove the screen lower seal and rail - which I repainted (along with various other details) in brown to match the whacky vinyl which now covers the dash top. Because the vinyl has a bonded foam/cloth backing I had to cut back all the dash top panel edges to stop them 'bulking up' and preventing a good fit. ID and DS dashboards from the 60's are made up of a myriad of pieces, and because I wanted to polish the delicate aluminium trim behind the steering wheel the whole column had to come out - so that got painted too! I'd bought the rusty remains of a dash from a LHD '67 Pallas, but decided against converting to the 'swoopy' DS-type because I was short of vital parts like the glove box. But it did give me a spare set of switches etc. - which I cleaned up to use as 'extras'. We fabricated a nifty panel to house the new american radio I'd bought - complete with iPod + power connections in the glove box.The main 2-tone panels were painted to match the bodywork, and the whole lot was very carefully reassembled. It's worth mentioning that before putting the dash and windscreen back in, the lower screen seal and rail were carefully refitted using a non-setting guttering mastik to prevent any chance of leakage.

Having previously mentioned the refurbishment and modification (to take head rests) of the replacement seat frames, these eventually came back from Darren Evans beautifully trimmed in the stunning mint green cloth I had found on e-Bay. Having thought they would take around 5m of fabric, he ended up using almost the whole 10m - these are much bigger seats than most modern cars! Luckily I managed to buy some more cloth for the door cards, which are the only major trimming job left to do.

One small dilemna was the positioning of the front pair of speakers. I resisted cutting holes in the fairly straight gold cloth door cards* given to me by fellow Citroënist David Bourne, and I persuaded friend Ian to fabricate some neat steel panels to house the oval speakers. These have been trimmed in the brown vinyl and mounted in the back corners of the front footwell (just inboard of the chassis side members).

*I've bought a set of 4 new plastic door cards ready for re-trimming when I've found another couple of (left-hand) 'breast implants' - the Dunlopillo molded padding which covers the arm rests. On cloth covered rests these always go hard and crusty; so I need to find some from vinyl covered cards. There is also an element of 'plucking up courage' to do this job because the way they were put together originally is very strange . . .

More picrures of the interior will be posted when the sun comes out and Hilly can take them

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