Restoration of the interior and painting of the old vinyl roof on my Boattail.

July 2000 - Interior, vinyl roof & weather strips

The interior was really nice, apart from the floor as earlier described and the only thing I had to do was to give it a good clean and mount it back in the car again.

Of course I replaced the floor mat with a new one in black closed loop style, just as the original.

I also replaced all weather strips with new ones and it made the car a lot quieter to drive. The old ones had never been replaced and they were badly worn.

On this photo you can see the result.

The majority (81%) of the 73 Riveras was fitted with a vinyl roof. Not this one though.
I found that out later on, when I got hold of the original invoice information on micro fish from Sloan museum in Flint, Michigan.

But as you can see on this photo, the car got a white vinyl roof fitted some time after manufacturing.

Maybe this was made by the original dealer, as a dealer option?

Maybe some previous owner did this in order to customize his car?

Probably the later is what actually happened, due to the bad quality of the fitting and the fact that the factory vinyl roofs on 1973 Rivieras, were always mounted on the front part of the roof, as far as I know.

On 71 Rivs they covered the whole roof and on 72:s they seem to be mounted either way, based upon the majority of original factory photos I came across so far.
But no year had the vinyl mounted on the rear area of the roof.

Nevertheless, this had to come of later on, in order to restore the original look. And personally I like the cleaner look with no vinyl roof better.

But for now, I had to keep it on, due to rust underneath that I could see by lifting the edge of the vinyl. So I cleaned it and applied a couple of layers of vinyl roof paint on it, in order to make it look as good as possible for the time being.  

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The restoration began in February of 2000

Most parts of the car were restored by July 2006, but as many of you know, there is always something to improve on a project like this.

In this section of the site you will be able to follow some of the various restoration steps of my Boattail.

2000-02  The carburetor

2000-05  The floor

2000-07  Vinyl roof & interior

2001-01  Heads and intake

2001-11  Lifting the engine

2002-01  Engine detailing

2005-01  Body restoration