Morris Minor Owners Club

As my search for a better interior is proving fruitless so considering flashing the credit card and buying the full kit from ESM for around £1750 (ouch! But I did say considering)

Has anyone bought a full late traveller kit and are there any experiences to share.

Thanks in advance.

ESM will just buy the kit from Newton Commercial, so check their prices/availability too. On that basis, the quality will be as good as you can get.

It is now very difficult to get a decent secondhand interior. Not surprising really as any car being dismantled will be a pretty poor example!

ManyMinors wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 6:02 pm It is now very difficult to get a decent secondhand interior.

Though if you're in no hurry to buy the interior then they do come up from time to time, or piece them together from various bits for sale while re-using good existing parts if possible.

ManyMinors wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 6:02 pm ESM will just buy the kit from Newton Commercial, so check their prices/availability too. On that basis, the quality will be as good as you can get.

It is now very difficult to get a decent secondhand interior. Not surprising really as any car being dismantled will be a pretty poor example!

The ESM price is already significantly lower than Newtons price.

However I just don’t see it as good value in an absolute sense. £1750 for plastic seats and trims just seems like £1000 too much! I’d imagine a bespoke leather retrim may even be cheaper.

Seems like I’m just chucking money away.

Dither dither dither.

Grumpy21 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 8:00 pm get.




I’d imagine a bespoke leather retrim may even be cheaper.

I rather doubt it. Have a ring around a few trimming firms and get a quote or two. Trim work is very labour intensive and expensive. The materials alone are costly. I know somebody who recently spent over £3000.00 on the interior trim for a Morris Minor. I agree, it seems a lot of money on the face of it but you just have to look at the prices that a really good restored Traveller fetches now to put things into perspective. Most of us Morris Minor owners are rather living in the past!

Morning. Last car I retrimmed in leather was an mGB GT, seats were £300 front and £180 rear, set of carpets £90 and all six door cards for £150. So everything in leather for under £750. About the same time I had a rather shoddy Morris and couldn’t understand why the trim was so expensive given it was just plastic.

Take your point though. Guess I’m just tight

For my part I fitted duo tone door cards of the appropriate colour and a new carpet set after fitting duo tone seat covers in vinyl.
This was done over months as I gathered the pennies to do it.
I cant remember the total costs, but looking at the ESM website just now I think they have gone up quite a bit.
We forget sometimes the Minor was "the working mans Rolls Royce" and also forget that if sold it would be nice to get some money back.
Like the house that can be overextended beyond its value, a car can have so much spent on it we are throwing money away.
NB. I kept the old seat covers and door cards in storage for the purist buyer.
I never forget though, although I love my car to bits, its just a Minor.

Thread revival…

Being a tight wad I decided to buy the correct vinyl from Martrim in Sandbach and tackle some of the interior myself.

So far I’m rather pleased with the results

Still need to think about the seats and door cards

thanks Mike

There's the patch on the rear seat squab and some very obvious ripped vinyl on the rear of the drivers seat. I may be able to get both sorted if I can locate a local trimmer who will do the job. The door cards are warped at the bottom on both sides and no longer fit nicely. All the seats look tired, faded and worn.

I'm looking at a product called Vinylkote to recolour the seats but at around £100 per litre its a bit of a risk.

I'm currently just under £90 in and I think the parts I've replaced myself would have cost over £600

The door cards are warped at the bottom on both sides and no longer fit nicely. All the seats look tired, faded and worn.

I was watching a restoration show recently, where to save money the restorer soaked the 'board' element of the door cards with water and then weighted them down (on a flat floor surface) until they'd dried out, to flatten them again.
I don't know whether you have the space to do this but if you can then you could treat them after with a water repellent to help stop them getting damp again.
Best wishes,
Mike.

I carefully peeled the vinyl off our door trims and re-mounted them on new boards made from varnished 4mm ply then added a aluminium semi circle to cover the area where the passenger door lock had worn the vinyl away, came out a treat.
for seats if you can get behind the tears you can glue vinyl behind and butt the torn edges back together, if the vinyl isn't badly degraded it can be barely noticeable.