1954 Chevy Pickup | Door Panels & Arm Rests

October 10th, 2004 : Door Panels & Arm Rests

I'm not quite ready to start creating the interior I want yet ... I'll get serious about that after I buy the new seats I want. But I started making templates for my door panels and as you can see in the photo below, my truck (originally) had no arm rests ...
Original Door Panels

... so I decided to fabricate my own. I'm experimenting with some 1-inch x 2-inch pieces of pine for the base, and a 1-inch x 3-inch piece of pine for the top:

Arm Rest Assembly

The photos above show the basic assembly of the base, with the top sitting on it. The top piece is going to get padded with foam, adding more height to it, and once I get around to actually doing the interior, it'll get covered with vinyl.

Arm Rest Prototype

Above, is the finished prototype, all glued together and ready to install. I'll be shaping it more than this, but in the meantime I'm going to bolt it on the door and see how I like it.

Arm Rest Prototype Installed

Shucks! You're not really surprised, are you? This kind of thing happens on nearly every first-time project, eh? I knew the door mount for the arm rest was on an angle ... I just forgot about it in my zeal over designing the arm rest itself. It's an easy fix ... I'm going to make another piece that will correct the angle ... and now that it's installed I can see it could be wider, giving my arm more to rest on ... and it can also be longer; more towards the back of the cab. At least I now have something to pull the door shut with -- not having that armrest was a real pain!

For the door panels, I started out with some poster board ... cutting pieces and applying them to the door, taping them together until I had a perfect outline of the shape I wanted. There were over a dozen odd pieces of poster board taped together by the time I was done. Then I took the poster board template and laid it on top of some heavy duty waxed cardboard -- my couzin gave me some 4-foot x 8-foot sheets of this stuff, and it'll be great to actually use as panels in other parts of the interior, but for the door panels I'm using it as a final template to be applied to some 1/8-inch plastic that I'll be laminating and covering with vinyl as the finished door panels. You'll see that process when I get to it ... but for now, here's what my driver-side template looks like:
Cardboard Door Template

I bought these Auveco Panel Clips | Part#11406 online ... 100 clips for $7.00 ($12.50 with shipping) ... and I'll use these to install my door panels. I decided on these because they hold up much better and much longer than the plastic clips -- plus, they are about 1/10th the cost of the the plastic clips and also because they are old-school style!

Auveco Panel Clips #11406

And so, this is a beginning ... the start of creating an original-style interior for my beloved truck.

UPDATE -- November 10th, 2006 : Chevy Duty Arm Rests
I gave in this week and ordered armrests Click Here

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