68/70Vette
Well-known member
After a year and a half (two years?) I finally reserved an appointment with Al Knoch's visit to the Pomona Fair Grounds. Al Knoch is from El Paso and he has a large tractor trailer that makes appearances to various car meets. I finally got an appointment for a June 6 soft top install for my 68 Convertible. June 6 was a Sunday. Actually I also wanted Al to redo my 68 seats (bright medium blue). So he was there on Saturday (June 5) and I drove my 68 seats out to him in my Cadillac. The tractor trailer truck didn't have leather 68 seat covers in it so they are going to take the seats back to El Paso. So...the next morning, I had to drive my 68 for the top install...but no seats.....what to do?...simple.....take the seats out of my 1970! They are red.
I arrived, as scheduled at 10:00 AM on Sunday with my blue Corvette and it's now red seats. However, the car in front of me, they started working on it at 6:00AM was running late. It was a 74 Convertible .....but had a 68 convertible frame and a lot of rusted fasteners. Anyhow since I was going to be late and my 70 red seats looked bad, I asked if they could redo the 70- red seats? Bingo..the trailer had 70 leather seat covers so I asked them to recover my 70 seats also.
It took maybe 5 1/2 hours to instal a new soft top (they didn't start on my top until about noon). I was surprised at how meticulous and tedious the job was. Quite a bit of the time there were two people working on the car. The chief installer's name was Adam. The end result was very nice. A factory stock appearing top with no wrinkles. Extremely smooth in appearance. Adam installed thin foam sheets under neath the top, and a lot of other underneath underlayers, to make it very smooth as the top was installed, deployed. Absolutely, beautiful.
My 70 red seat covers were installed by the same man who is in Al's DVD on how to install seat covers.. Sorry I didn't get his name. He has large muscles in his forearms. This necessary to compress the new and seemingly oversize new seat foam. I tried previously to recover seats with new foam, but didn't realize how much muscle power is required. Later I saw the brute force required on the DVD and then, of course, watched it in person.
I was there for about 7 hours. I had a lot of opportunity to talk with Al Knoch and his employees. I was really impressed. He has a great crew of people and Al is very easy to talk with. During the day a large number of people came to the display and asked Al a lot of questions...of course many of the questions were pretty ...well simplistic. Al was very polite to everyone. Al is also a collector of ..junk. As the swap meet was winding to a close, he invited me into his rented Suburban to look for possible bargains. Just a really nice person, and if you didn't know, you'd really never realize that he owned the whole company and had really achieved everything his company has done. The employees put in some really long hours at the Pomona car show and Al had hotel reservations for the crew in Hermosa Beach for a day to relax on Monday. Then they would all fly back to El Paso. Well, all would fly but the man who installed my seat covers. He would be driving the tractor trailer back to El Paso.
Also, Al Knoch's company has all the little bits and pieces of interior and seat hardware. They've bought it from original vendors in many instances and their prices are a lot lower than the Corvette vendors. These bits and pieces are not in their catalog, so if you're looking for these parts, give them a call.
Also, there was a couple of people from Australia. They came to buy parts to hand carry back to Australia. Since I lived in Australia for 9 years, it was good to have a conversation and get a little updated with Ozzy.
All of my arrangements with Al Knoch were done with his employee Dale.
Also at the end of the day, Al sprung for McDonalds and beer for the crew. I opted out of McDonalds, but did take two cans of beer. Tasted good on a long hot day.
I arrived, as scheduled at 10:00 AM on Sunday with my blue Corvette and it's now red seats. However, the car in front of me, they started working on it at 6:00AM was running late. It was a 74 Convertible .....but had a 68 convertible frame and a lot of rusted fasteners. Anyhow since I was going to be late and my 70 red seats looked bad, I asked if they could redo the 70- red seats? Bingo..the trailer had 70 leather seat covers so I asked them to recover my 70 seats also.
It took maybe 5 1/2 hours to instal a new soft top (they didn't start on my top until about noon). I was surprised at how meticulous and tedious the job was. Quite a bit of the time there were two people working on the car. The chief installer's name was Adam. The end result was very nice. A factory stock appearing top with no wrinkles. Extremely smooth in appearance. Adam installed thin foam sheets under neath the top, and a lot of other underneath underlayers, to make it very smooth as the top was installed, deployed. Absolutely, beautiful.
My 70 red seat covers were installed by the same man who is in Al's DVD on how to install seat covers.. Sorry I didn't get his name. He has large muscles in his forearms. This necessary to compress the new and seemingly oversize new seat foam. I tried previously to recover seats with new foam, but didn't realize how much muscle power is required. Later I saw the brute force required on the DVD and then, of course, watched it in person.
I was there for about 7 hours. I had a lot of opportunity to talk with Al Knoch and his employees. I was really impressed. He has a great crew of people and Al is very easy to talk with. During the day a large number of people came to the display and asked Al a lot of questions...of course many of the questions were pretty ...well simplistic. Al was very polite to everyone. Al is also a collector of ..junk. As the swap meet was winding to a close, he invited me into his rented Suburban to look for possible bargains. Just a really nice person, and if you didn't know, you'd really never realize that he owned the whole company and had really achieved everything his company has done. The employees put in some really long hours at the Pomona car show and Al had hotel reservations for the crew in Hermosa Beach for a day to relax on Monday. Then they would all fly back to El Paso. Well, all would fly but the man who installed my seat covers. He would be driving the tractor trailer back to El Paso.
Also, Al Knoch's company has all the little bits and pieces of interior and seat hardware. They've bought it from original vendors in many instances and their prices are a lot lower than the Corvette vendors. These bits and pieces are not in their catalog, so if you're looking for these parts, give them a call.
Also, there was a couple of people from Australia. They came to buy parts to hand carry back to Australia. Since I lived in Australia for 9 years, it was good to have a conversation and get a little updated with Ozzy.
All of my arrangements with Al Knoch were done with his employee Dale.
Also at the end of the day, Al sprung for McDonalds and beer for the crew. I opted out of McDonalds, but did take two cans of beer. Tasted good on a long hot day.
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