Paul Wilson’s 6C 2500 Roadster, Part 8

As soon as the car arrived back from the paint shop I eagerly put on the taillights, glued in the trunk seals, and installed the fuel filler. It looked fantastic.

Then I started on the interior. That’s just a matter of cutting panels to size, gluing on material, and screwing them in place–right? I’d already made flanges to screw to. But it’s never that easy.

Covering the awkward side areas behind the seats and the shut posts with smooth, simple panels was a challenge.

Fitting bright trim around the door openings took several days.

An even bigger job was the doors, where a complex curved top section wouldn’t match the flat lower part. But that was a blessing in disguise…

…prompting me to put a strip of bright trim where the top and bottom panels meet. Perfect for the period, and more exciting than a plain door.

The dash also presented unexpected puzzles.

The side areas were easy: just a couple of pieces of plywood…

…covered with green upholstery, did the job in period fashion.

But the central instrument panel was harder. Even though I had a complete set of correct 6C2500 parts–two big gauges, a turn switch, a starter push, an ignition key that doubles as a light switch, and two warning lights–each attaches differently.

Some have inner and outer rings that tighten on sheet metal, some are made to countersink in a wood dash of different thicknesses. I made the basic form from plywood, put on a metal front skin.

Finally, I covered it with green material, and custom-fitted each instrument and switch.

Working on the interior, at the end of every day I could stand back and look at something beautiful. But then I got into difficult jobs that gave no such rewards. First I had to make a floor–and before that, something to rest it on. The X-frame left a big open space.

The position of the original battery box, tucked behind the passenger seat, was OK except the battery was smaller. So I made a new battery box.

Period roadsters such as my XK120 had plywood floors, which works fine on flat areas. Metal is needed for the tunnel and transmission hump, and also for the upward curve behind the seats. I made patterns with paper…

…then the actual parts, being careful to design the way they fitted together.

I wanted to take off the transmission cover without removing the floorboards, for example, so it had to sit on top. A panel near the pedals allows easy access to the master cylinder. A tidy cover attached with two wing nuts fits over the battery.

I’ve said that this work was merely functional, aesthetically unrewarding. But those clean black floors and bright aluminum were so pretty that I hated to cover them with the felt that goes under carpet.

The wiring harness was another huge, thankless challenge. There’s no such thing as an off-the-shelf 6C2500 wiring harness. So I had to design my own from first principles. Some stuff only works when the ignition is on, other things don’t. Each circuit needs a fuse. The brake lights use the same wire as the rear turn signals, which is coordinated by an eight-terminal relay. On a huge poster board, I drew lines between the components, from which I made a list of individual wires and their endpoints. There are lots of wires–45 different color codes, not counting black ground wires.

As I ran individual wires, lying on my back with aching neck muscles, huge tangles accumulated at the dash, the fuse boxes, and the firewall box. Their color codes should have clarified things: blue with white to the high beams, for example. But most of the period-correct wires looked more or less the same. Is this a green/yellow, or a green/red? They all seemed a sort of a muddy brownish-green. Many times I found myself gazing at this mess, my mind a blank, having short-circuited some minutes before.

In the end, I got everything working. Many hours with a circuit tester finally paid off. And while wiring gives no visual reward, seeing the headlights go on, or hearing the horn, are moments of triumph after such an ordeal.