General Lee Roll-Bar:

[Captain D]

Recently, I purchased a G.L. roll-bar from Jake's online shop. Great item all round' hands down. I love it, but I don't know if I'm going to keep the black padding that it came with. I'm kind of partial to the early version roll-bar, which is the brown. I learned that for the t.v. show, they just painted everything brown. But, in practical purposes, and for longevity, I probably won't paint the existing padding.

I've called MANY hardware stores, including various ebay stores selling the polyethylene tubular foam insulation. They just sell the real small diameter foam tubing in brown. I kinda need the larger tubing. I'm thinking about just going to a fabric store...finding brown material to simply cover the existing black padding, and convert it to "brown" that way.

If I may ask:

1.) For those of you G.L. owners with the roll-bars, and if there are any out there with the brown padding especially, where did you get your larger/thicker brown padding?
2.) And, did you use the upholstery tape on your roll-bar like they did in the t.v. series? If so, what specific kind (if any) is the most authentic to get?

I realize that this sounds kinda picky just over a roll-bar, but, hey, I'm this way for my entire Charger, which can be a good thing I suppose  .

Thank you for any responses!
Aaron

[Mike DC]

Yeah, the 2" ID padding is actually kinda hard to find nowadays.

Try a few plumbing supply stores before you start compromising with other things.  Most will at least have 2 3/8" ID pipe padding if not also the 2" stuff you really want.  The 2 3/8" ID stuff can be trimmed down to fit perfectly although it's bit tedious.

As for the color, I've seen a bunch of people who have gotten an upholstery shop to make some fabric/vinyl/leather covers for the padding.  Like what you see on a lot of modern Jeep Wrangler rollbars.  It's not hard to get the stuff made to velcro on.



You might wanna think hard about using some denser-type padding for the area around the driver/passenger heads, if nowhere else.  Hitting your head on a rollbar is not pleasant, and they've just about decided that anything less than modern stiff-feeling pads aren't enough for your head.  Everyone has used foam pipe insulation on rollbars in general for decades in the past, but modern race car crash-testing doesn't speak very well for the stuff when it comes to hard parts of your body hitting it. 

 

[Captain D]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for posting. I agree, even though I've tried places like Home Depot for the large polyethylene foam tubing, I'll try checking out as many plumbing and craft stores as I can.

*Modified* - Thank you Jim for the info! I think I'm good to go now....

[mopar0166]

How's the fit and what's the site you ordered from thanks

[Dino]

What kind of padding did they supply?  If it's a good material, dying it the correct tan is by far the easiest to do.  Degrees and dry it a few times and use SEM prep and dye.  Comes in spray cans and looks awesome.  You can bend it and squeeze it and it won't come off.

[Brock Lee]

The show used closed cell foam used in the airconditioning industry. Early versions were either sprayed tan (which didn't hold up for crap) or brown gaffers tape was applied to it from top to bottom.