Dart party

[Dart Lady]

My husband and I paid one price for four Darts earlier this month:

The four-door is mine. The convertible is his. The others are for parts (back glass, for instance). All are pretty rough! We'll be doing abbreviated, poor-man's restorations, but I'm really excited about these projects. Seriously, my thoughts are frequently preoccupied at work by my car, planning what to do next and then what to do after that. My current puzzle: I'm creating my own seat covers and have been disassembling the seats from the 4-door in order to use the existing covers for patterns.

My husband has gotten the four-door and the convertible running.

The pair of two-doors are hopeless, but we only want them to scavenge off of anyway. The guy we bought them from said we had to take all or none, so we took all.

My husband is going to patch some metal in to close up the holes in the floor...

That's it for now!

 

[goldfish65]

Welcome to the obsession Dart Lady, that's a cool name, congrats on getting them running!

 

[Darwin]

Nice score, 4 for 1. Your husband made a couple good choices here, first for choosing a bride with enthusiasm for this great hobby, and second for choosing the 'vert,as that would have been my choice of the four. Good luck with the builds and keep us posted.

 

[dglearn]

would love to see more pics of the yellow one (65) and its fender tag.

 

[Dartnut]

Keep the pics coming!
I really like low budget builds.
Great projects there!

 

[Dart Lady]

What's a fender tag?

 

[68383GTS]

Welcome...I like the convertible...

 

[rumblefish360]

What's a fender tag?

On the drivers fender, there is a metal plate, thin, approx. 2 X 4 inch in size screwed into the fender. This tag has embosed numbers and letters that are a code for what the car came equiped with.

 

[Old Tired Rebel]

Welcome and I will follow your new adventure.

 

[Dart Lady]

I've been working on re-covering my seats. I started with the back part of the back seat. Before:

It had some sort of scrubbing pads glued across the top, for some reason. Glued right down on the vinyl. Here's a picture of the cover once I took it off to use as a template:

And here is my seat back, restuffed, recovered, and hog ringed all up:

I'm super pleased with how not-as-hard-as-I-thought-it-would-be constructing the seat cover was. I'm also really happy with the materials I chose and how they work together. I actually had a vision of almost this exact fabric paired with almost this exact vinyl and was able to find close enough approximations online that I feel my vision was realized! I'm also really stoked to have a whole seat portion put together.

On the other hand, it's obviously lopsided. I think that was partly in my sewing one of the sides back on and partly in my applying the cover to the seat. It didn't want to line up right, but I decided to begin hog ringing and hope I could work it out as I went. It still ended up lopsided.

For now, I'm going to leave it. I'm going to keep working on seat portions. I chose the back seat back to start with because I figured it had the least that could go wrong with it, and I made myself swear I wouldn't be a perfectionist about it and just get it done. If I get the other three seat portions done and still feel like the lopsidedness is sticking in my craw, I'll try to manipulate it again. But at this point, progress is more important than perfection, so tally ho!

 

[memike]

Welcome to this great site, I am so happy that you and your husband enjoy a hobby like this together :color:
Keep us updated, The rear seat looks very groovy Dart Lady and fitting for the year model, I was born in the 50'es and the 70'es was good to me :wink:
Enjoy the great tec's and folks we have here.
You will be getting allot of questions on the GT Dart Yellow,
All you have to do is ask and a tec will be here to help when needed :cheers:

 

[Dart Lady]

I couldn't handle that wonky seat back, so my husband and I fixed it tonight. I also finished the back seat bottom, so the back seat is done! I'm really excited with how it turned out.

My husband has the front end off, and he's going to replace it with the front end off the blue two-door. He's also patching up some rust. He's also had to cut off the cowl so he could get to the rusted-out duct work underneath there, and he's working on fabricating some new ducts. Then he'll weld the cowl back on.

Things always look worse before they look better, right?

 

[mosleyme]

I'm really excited with how it turned out.

Groovy! I dig it.

 

[64dartconv]

Seats are cool!! Good luck from a fellow Dart owner

 

[4spdragtop]

Nice find with all them Darts, looks like lots of good parts for you on the donor cars. Nice work on the seats, very cool. To be honest I was hoping the vert was yours.....a topless Mopar Babe!!! LOL Keep up the great work and keep us posted!!

 

[PapstXX]

Welcome

 

[4spdcuda66]

Welcome to the site!! Yes, they ALWAYS look worse before they look better. I like what you did with the upholstery, it's even more wild than the Mod Top pattern. Welcome to the obsession!!

 

[Old Tired Rebel]

Keep up the good work.