It had been keeping him up at night, lying there in bed struggling with the problem. He had watched his grandmother sew clothing on her Wilcox & Gibbs chain stitch machine and he had learned much from her over the years, but still his plan eluded him. He was 18.

Loren Burch was living in Pasadena at the time and had just restored his first car, a 1913 Ford Model T and wanted to give the car a diamond tufted leather interior. But how to get the right spacing between the pattern, the base pattern and fold was overwhelming.

The vision as he calls it came to him at 3 o’clock one fall morning and it was “life altering,” he tells me recently while in Warwick, working on a 1913 Pope-Hartford owned by Dick Shappy. The day after his vision, he laid the leather out on the floor and had it all figured out.

Burch, now 63, is one of only a half dozen in the automobile restoration business who have perfected diamond tufted leather interiors.

You don’t go to him, he comes to you, flying around the country to work on clients’ automobile upholstery or canvas tops and you must provide the sewing machine. His clients’ cars have won prestigious awards at Pebble Beach and other Concours around the country.

And the 1913 Ford Model T that started it all was purchased in 1992 by the Japanese Industrial Development Museum in Chiba, Japan, where it now sits on a pedestal.

By Steve Szydlowski, sszydlow@projo.com