A while back, I posted a review on one of the headliner repair tech articles here on TGO (found here) and I got some good feedback from everyone. The most notable points were how to prep the actual fiberglass board for recovering and which glue to use.

Yesterday, I started on an in-depth documentation of recovering my current headliner, which is a t-top (the previous article was based on the hardtop version), and will now include recovering the sail panels, as well. I will NOT be documenting recovery of the sun visors, as it will be much simpler and less time-consuming (for me, anyway) to buy those rather than learn how to sew. There are already a ton of pictures and I have only removed and mostly cleaned up the headliner board. There is still a good amount of glue to get off of it.

As for right now, I want to get some feedback from all of you. My current plan is to recover the board using standard black headliner material, but have been toying with the idea of recovering it in black vinyl (sail panels as well). If anyone has opinions on this, please post them. Also, if anyone has some pictures of this already done, I'd definitely like to see them.

The complete walkthrough will be posted either here or on a seperate website, depending on how the mods feel about me posting a good deal of pictures. I think the tech articles on headliner recovery here are a bit lacking, so I'm going to try to make this as complete as possible.

 

If you end up doing that that should be cool. I tried recovering my headliner with black vinyl and I couldn't get it to stick I bought the right upholestry glue as well it wasn't 3M super 77 or whatever. It could have been because that my headliner board was just too far gone, but I thought I had done a good job of repairing it it. All in all I ended up giving up and trashed it =/ I'll just buy an ABS headliner when I get the cash.

 

Any pictures?

 

Sadly no, I tried this back in December. I just couldn't get the damn material to stick to the board. I used a tiff wire brush to get all the gunk off the headliner and I repaired soft spots and indentations in the headliner with fiberglass and that part all went well. However once I tried gluing the material it just wouldn't stick and I had all these saggy parts. I thought at first was because I needed the glue to get a bit more tacky, so I let the glue sit on the board a bit before I tried applying the fabric over it and that seemed to work a little better, but still. Then i thought I just had to let it dry longer...so I thought I had enough glue on there and a good stick for the most part and I let it sit for two days and still just couldn't get the material to stick well. Maybe it was jus tthe type of vinyl I had, it had a cloth back, but perhaps it just wasn't good enough. Hopefully you'll have better results.

 

thirdgenresource.com sells headliner foams with the fabric on them already all you need to do is cut out dome light and install them ..they sell for 150 bucks which is kinda high but you get new foam and its ABS platic and it can be any color yu want it to be http://www.thirdgenresource.com/headliners?b=1

 

Yes I realize that you can buy the headliners from them. That's where I'm buying the sun visors from. The whole point of this thread is to educate everyone here on how to do it yourself if you don't want to spend that much money. The complete kit with headliner, sail boards, and sun visors is $250 plus shipping. The site says they are drop shipped by truck I believe, which is probably at least $20... way too much to be justifiable, in my opinion. I will post prices on everything when I do the write up.

Please, no more posts about where to get pre-made headliners. That's not what this thread is about.

As for the vinyl, if it really was that difficult I guess I'll stick with the standard headliner material. Still, if anyone has some pictures with vinyl installed on the headliner and sail panels, feel free to post them up.

 

oh....and its not like I was out too much money either I bought like 2 yards for $6-7 a yard and like another $10 for fiberglass stuff, which I can use for other things, and like $4 for a can of glue that still might come in handy. So it wasn't that big a deal, you live you learn.

 

a buddy of mine already done his sail panels in black vinly along w/ door panels and they look great but he caught soo much junk over the vinyl muffling his speaker sound it wasnt funny.

his id is kdrtch i think i got that right he has thread about interior color change on here and gots pics of the black sails.
was a great idea he came up w/ it now toher ppl want to and some thought of it before im sure before he did but he done it and others might not have but hes got good pics of the sails n said he may do vinyl headliner soon as well.
do a search u should find it on here.

i done my headliner yesterday and reinstalled it today had thought of a tech article but my board was trash and id be embarassed to show ppl how trashed it was but i got it to work fine. plus i got no way of takin good quality pics.

 

Here's a couple progress pics.

 

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Sail panels

 

whoa weird mounting hardware on them sails thoose metal bracket thgins never seen that before.
looks like it would hold em really good tho.
u make them sails yurself? looks liek u might have out of some particle board

 

Lol... no, these are just pics of me taking everything out of the car. The brackets are standard as far as I know; they looked exactly the same on my old '84 also. The sails are stock.

 

hmm thats awesome wished mine had em.
mines got thoose plastic rivet clips like the pillar trim or door panels and they suck.
i redone mine up w/ some velcrow the other day.and if u pul them off itll tear the backin boards apart before that stuff lets go so oh wel lol no biggie.
i like thoose brackets.

 

I may be working on my headliner this weekend. T-top Trans Am... I'll be using standard black headliner material to recover the stock fiberglass piece. My sails don't need recovered, though I will be dying them black to match the rest of the refurbishing I've started. It will be nice to compare pics!

 

u mean compare pics w/ mine or just yur befores and afters lol.
mine was a huge comparison considering that like 2 or 3 days after gettin my car i took the headliner out n it had been out since then which was back in nov. and just now put it back in i was goin to get another board fomr a junkyard but couldnt get up there when i had the money to buy it and was no garutee it be there so i had work w/ what i had turned out nice.

i guess t top ones might be harder due to the curves and al because i didnt have to stretch my material anyways at all it is strchable stuff but all i done was got my dad grab the other side to hold it open then laid it right on the spray glued board and smoothed out w/ our hands.

 

It's tough! I did mine in black and grey vinyl but I don't have any snaps. I also did the sails in grey vinyl. I'll try to snap some shots tonight but I make no promises. I used 3m Spray 90 and did a little at a time. As always, the inside corners of the "T" was a B-EYE-ATCH!!!!!

 

hey usa-1 nice ride man i checked out yur cardomain page.
very nice w/ the paint and stripes and thoose tt-2's make any car i think ive always loved em.

also i thought i had a tight garage man that looks tough to get in and out of there man.

nice interior tho looks really good.

 

You sound like you're already pretty ahead of the game on this but I can toss in my limited experience. I just ripped out my headliner a couple of weekends ago- but I cheated and bought an abs precovered one (got the sun visors for Christmas too). I did recover a sail panel last night though, and my advice is to remove your old headliner material as carefully as possible and cut the new material using the old one as a pattern. That way you will be able to lay it out and have enough extra at the edges to pull around the back of the headliner. That's what I did with the sail panel and it worked pretty well- you can always trim extra material, but you can't add any if you're short. Work in small sections and let the glue dry for a few minutes before you stick the material to the board. Don't press too hard on the sail panel where the speaker holes are or they end up showing up as dimples once its covered.

As far as the vinyl goes- it always seemed cheaper looking to me than cloth, but I could just be remembering the interior of my dad's 68 nova. If you do go with it I would try to find a thin vinyl as it could probably get heavy hanging upside down and could have a tendancy to droop as time goes by...

Good luck and keep us posted. I'm interested in the install personally- as I haven't gotten that far yet, too much rust to deal with.

 

Thanks. I dubbed my project "Classic Roc" as I am going for a more classic look than the normal massive muscle look that seems to be more popular. The interior looks quite different right now.

My garage is awful tight. When I finally move into the "new" house I'm building a two car garage. I may even buy a small lift for one of the bays.

I didn't get a chance to get a pic last night. My wife went out and I was busy chasing my 20 month old daughter around the house. I'll try tonight.

 

Cayse,

Here's the pics, dude. If it doesn't work just check out the sig.

 

Double post!!!

 

The sails look good with the driver's seat, but I'm not too thrilled about the creases that the vinyl leaves. Looks like I'll be going the headliner material route.

Just getting over a cold and waiting for another nice day to get this project rolling again. Thanks for the pics.

 

Those aren't creases. Those are sections of grey vinyl that I cut and folded and then glued in place to create a seam where the black and grey met. You could do it a number of ways. I just liked this one.

 

I mean on the sail panels where the coat hanger is screwed down.

 

Yeah. That's a result of me not pulling the vinyl tight enough to bend the cardboard. It's pretty easily fixed.

 

I mean compare pics with CaysE's in progess pics and/or anyone elses interior do-over pics. I love restoration along with a little modification mixed in. I have about 16 years of interior recovering work (from custom stereo installations) and 18 years (concurrently) of snowmobile seat recoverings to draw vinyl experience from (both side businesses I've run on/off), but I'm still going with a classic cloth headliner material. I will be doing Hampton Vinyl seats from Hawks though, and a vinyl headliner would be to much. Hopefully the seat set gets here soon!!!

I did find it odd that your Camaro didn't have the clips on the speaker covers. I've done work on a dozen or so F-bodies doing stereo stuff and have never seen one without the clips, I know mine has them... Weird!

 

yea mine only had plastic rivets like the door panels have that's it.
Thoose were busted and broken anyways.
It is weird though. 1st f body I have had anything to do w/ though.

 

Just an update; I finally bought the headliner material from Joanne Fabrics, hopefully enough for the sails, too. All other materials are here: Bondo fiberglass cloth, 3M General Trim Adhesive (2 cans, can't be too safe)... I should be set to go this coming weekend.

Also on the way from fbodymotorsports are new sun visors, seatbelt trims to hold the headliner up, and a new plastic piece that goes on the ceiling at the back of the headliner board. It's gonna look nice in there.

Only thing I'm debating is refinishing the t-bar like was recently posted here by another member, since I already have the headliner out and a box with new weatherstripping waiting to be installed. We'll see what happens.