General Motors wowed the crowds in Monterey this year with the Cadillac Ciel Concept. In addition to being a larger-than life convertible, the vehicle featured a level of attention to detail that hasn’t been seen from the Wreath and Crest in over a century. That includes the beautiful olive wood interior. The good people at Cool Hunting recently sat down with GM Design to discover exactly what went into crafting the intricate pieces. Their story is more interesting than we thought the assembly of an interior could be, so interesting in fact that we went back to GM to get some more images of the process.

As it turns out, the interior wood trim was hewn from a 300-year-old olive tree that fell in a storm just outside of Naples, Italy. The tree was shipped to a Pennsylvania woodyard where it was then sectioned and kiln-dried. That’s where the designers from General Motors caught up with it and sent the 30-inch wide planks through a planer from the 1940s, then sanded and arranged them on a gantry, and then photographed the planks so that their unique grains could be recreated in a special computer program. From there, the chunks were sent to 3D Mass Design and Engineering, where they were cut to GM specifications and glued into their final configurations. Then, Metalcrafters in Fountain Valley, California took on the task of test-fitting and applying the final stain and finish.

How’s that for craftsmanship?

Meet the tree Cadillac used to make the Ciel Concept’s gorgeous wood interior originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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