Custom Interiors car styling

Interiors are another aspect of car styling that are best left to professionals if you want to achieve show winning results. However, it's not as difficult as you may think and as long as approached with logic, initiative and above all, patience, there's no reason you shouldn't achieve satisfactory results.

The styling you decide on for your interior should reflect the overall theme of the vehicle. For a genuine 'Resto-Rod' it will be more a case of reviving or re-newing the existing interior rather than radical changes to the design or look. If however, you want to lose that moulded plastic panel look used in later vehicles, you might want to re-design the whole thing into something more sumptuous.

Some of the most popular materials used when upholstering interiors are:

• Leather
• Leathercloth
  
• Suede
• Vinyl
• Naugahyde

and to a lesser extent these days with exception of Lowriders and the like:

• Velvet
• Dralon
  

Whichever you decide, take careful thought. It's what you'll see most of.
Custom Interiors car styling

Channelling Lowrider

Channelling Lowrider:

Channelling Lowrider.

Channeling (also know these days as a 'body drop') is a fairly radical but very effective way of car styling to get your vehicle lower to the ground and 'in the weeds' as it were, without performing suspension modifications. The process in theory is pretty simple but in practice is much more difficult to carry out. Older cars like a Model A are much easier to perform this on as opposed to a later, full-fendered car.

Channelling Lowrider.

Basically it involves cutting the body loose from the floor, dropping the body by the desired amount, then re-welding the body back to the floor. depending on the chosen amount to be dropped, this can also have a dramatic effect on the the interior space as whatever amount is lowered over the floor is obviously lost in the interior height. If choosing to roof chop the vehicle then this space is reduced even more.

Gull-wing Doors Car Styling

Car Styling - Doors
Gull-wing Doors are doors that hinge from the roof as opposed to the conventional way of being hinged at the A or B post of the cars body. The name derives from the image obtained when the doors are in the up position and having the similarity to a seagulls wings in flight and were first used by Mercedes Benz in the early fifties on the 300SL race car.

Gull-wing Doors have advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that in tight parking spaces they require much less room to open than a conventional door and allow much better access for entering and exiting the vehicle. The downside is that in the event of an accident and the vehicle should end up on it's roof then the doors become impossible to open and escape only viable through the windscreen.

Many manufacturers over the years have used the Gull-wing design and are also very popular in the Kit Car and Custom scene.