1970 Dodge Super Bee Restoration Part 10 - Inside Out

Where is the one area of your car that you get to spend the most time? If you said under the hood, we apologize. For us, it's the interior. The area where we sit behind the tachometer that frequently registers somewhere around 6,000 rpm and hope we don't miss Third gear. Let's face it, what good is a car if it has no interior? You can make the outside of the car look great, but without an interior, you aren't taking it anywhere, unless you don't mind driving while sitting on a milk crate.

It's been a few months since we last saw our project 'Bee, and we had just completed building a custom dash for it. Now it's time to finish the interior so we can actually get comfortable. Even though we are customizing the car, we still want it to resemble a Superbee. So, when it comes to the interior, even with a custom dash and the addition of a roll bar, we still want the rest of the interior to look stock. Regardless of how custom we decide to go, we still needed seats, interior panels, carpeting, and a head liner. We could have ordered a pair of aftermarket seats that are upgraded in regards to comfort and support, but like I said, we want to retain the stock look. Luckily, when we bought the car about nine years ago, it came with all of the hard parts we would need--or so we thought. While the frames of the seats were definitely usable, the skins had seen better days many days ago. Those would need to be replaced. There are a lot of places to get new interior pieces, but we got ours from PUI (Parts Unlimited Interiors). PUI was founded in 1977, and they tell us that they have a commitment to serve the automotive aftermarket industry. This is our first time using PUI pieces, and we were pleased with them. From the factory, our 'Bee came in B5 Blue with a blue interior, and we planned to keep it that way. When we started to get all of our components around to install the interior, this is when we actually found that most of our plastic pieces were not in reusable shape. Either they were broken, or cracked. Now, you can scour the swap meets and hope you find usable pieces, or you can simply call Tony D'Agostino of Tony's Parts. At first, we had originally called Tony to see about getting some previously installed parts, but when he told us that he manufactures some new pieces, we decided that was the way to go. We did have to dye/paint them to match our interior, but you won't if your interior is black. During our build, we also planned to remove the heater box from the car, because frankly, we live in Florida. But, we didn't want to cut off the availability of having fresh air, so we'll show you how we fixed that situation.