I have mentioned before that I just wish someone would sell new replacement door panels from new molds made out of something maybe like what they use on the C6 door panels - sort of a textured rubber-like material?

I have a custom leather VE interior (all the items they sell as standard listed items), but it is really hard for me to justify the expense of custom leather re-covered door panels on a 17 year old car!

For those that can afford it and like the leather look, that is great, but for every great re-covered leather door panel I have seen on this forum, I see three where the bubbled up vinyl looked better! Getting the seams to perfectly follow the contours is apparently a major challenge among other things and nothing looks cheaper to me than creased leather where it just does not lay properly. I will say the so far the only ones have seen that I would want came from APSIS and Caravaggio (same goes for recovered dashes). I get why they are so expensive as I have recovered door panels in leather before, I just cannot personally justify it. So I wish there was some alternative as I initially outlined.

 

Further... and part of the reason this irritates me as much as it does; a close lady friend I worked with for 9-10 years, her husband does custom high end interiors for a living. Many of the cars he's done have ended up in magazines. He has around a 1.5 year waiting list for people bringing their cars on a trailer from all over North America.
Until now I was unaware he was doing things wrong. He isn't, I'm sure.

 

There are plenty of upholstery guys that end up in magazines that never even get credit for it because they don't ever see the car they're working on. Someone brings them stuff, they do their part amd never hear from the customer again. For stitch work I can't do I use a guy that does phenomenal work for a reasonable cost who has had the very thing happen. He would open a magazine and recognize something he did.

The "proprietary corvette world" is very annoying.

 

I mean we deisgn a template based on OEM dashboard so that we can provide you with tailored leather cover for you to install yourself on your dashboard.

Take care

Jack
RedlineGoods Team

 

I'm interested too

 

Dennis at Double D is a good friend of mine. He did my dash, doors, console and is working on a second speaker box. After years of working 7 days a week providing amazing service and products to the Corvette community, he and his wife are starting to try to carve out some well deserved time for themselves. This has caused a back log, and several unreasonable people have caused him to stop taking calls all together so that he can get things caught up. I've seen both sides and acknowledge that some things could have been handled better by Dennis, I even suggested that he put out an open letter outlining the current situation. Unfortunately financial circumstances caused him to have to drop his vendor sponsorship of the site, so technically he cannot post any business information according to the rules of the site. That being said, it's probably not a good time to place any orders with DD Mods at this time, especially if you are in a hurry. I guarantee that if he takes your order he will fulfill it and it will be of good quality, it just won't be any time soon.

Another option that I did not see mentioned is that there is an UK company on Ebay that provides pre-cut leather pieces for all of the interior pieces in the C5. I have seen their products and they are good quality and fitment. Gluing it yourself is not as easy as it looks, but doable. Any local interior shop can do it and it should not be that expensive. I had a quote to do my dash for $600 and the leather was $125, so $725 all in for the dash is just over half what the named vendors charge and Caravaggio is at least double that. Your only options are thread color so if your looking for really custom stuff or multiple colors this won't work for you.

Correction: JF Customs is the ebay company and it is mentioned earlier.

 

You could also have your local shop make you the piece too, when I asked my guy what it would cost to wrap the door panels ( before I found out Redline made them) he said about $600 for him to make the skins how I wanted and the labor, which isn't much different if I bought the Redline skins and had him install them.

Now if you didn't have an abundance of installers in your area pre made pieces are the way to go.