Since I tossed my headliner due to mold I haven't found a second hand one on craiglist or anywhere local. I also did not want to spend upwards of $250 on an aftermarket one that may or not fit properly, as with all the posts I've read. I said to myself that I can make something that's not going to fit and I don't have to spend $250 to do it. So, I did it.

This is how I made my mold and I figured I'd share it with you guys.

Materials:

Cardboard. As long as its all uniform thickness its fine. This is used for flat areas

Cardboard Paper. Its a flexible paper found on the bottom of Swan hose pallets that Lowes sells. Its on other pallets too, but this is where its usually found. This is used for all the curves. Cut into diamond shapes, this stuff makes curves around the T roof corners easily.

Tinfoil

Tape I'd use the blue painters tape but masking tape worked as well.

Fiberglass Resin (1-2 qts depending on how bad you are with it) and Fiberglass Cloth ( 2 1/2 packages)


Thats about it for what I made my initial mold from. I'd start with the center bar area and maybe the middle of the roof in back since its all flat pretty much. Then, do the areas above the sun visors. Follow the curve on the plastic molding on each end to get the idea of the shape.Then, do the areas around the seatbelt housing (cardboard paper...and a pain in the butt). Finally, do the curves around the middle T roof or whatever its name is.

In this shot you can kinda see how everything meshes, albeit covered in alot of tape. Your going to need alot of tape unless you want to use glue. Its faster to just tape everything.



Now we should have some sort of working shape of everything. We now have to take this out of the car. But, it'll be flimsy. This is where paper mache comes in. Yeah, paper mache. 2 cups of water and 1 cup of flour and about 3-5 layers later this is what you'll get. The paper mache, in enough layers, will keep the desired shape of your mold. The more layers you put on, the better it will be. I would use 5 layers or more around the curves.




There may be some indentions or bowling out from the paper mache messing with the tape, so you'll have to eyeball this and make some modifications. The middle of this will be very flimsy which is why I have it hanging.

Finally, wrap this thing up in tinfoil and the fiberglass it. I used two layers of fiberglass cloth, laying the cloth in the opposite direction on layer two. Here is the fiberglassed version still attached with no cuts made for seatbelts or visors or anything. This is where I'm at now.



I'm in about 25 hours up to this point, mostly in the design end of sitting in the car and thinking while staring at my roof. I stll have to sand, use some body filler to smooth over areas near the seatbelt housings ( again, REAL PAIN ) and fiberglass over that. Then, I can remove it from the original mold, cut the needed holes and slots, and cover it in fabric. I'll post more pictures when I do more work.

Again, thought I'd share what I've done over the past 2 weeks with the board incase anyone has ever thought of doing this.

 

Awesome

 

similar to what I ended up doing. I think I'm at around 40 hours now on mine. Good thing I have the week off from work and nothing important to do.

 

Hmmm....

My hats off to ya man... When I read the title, I thought it was going to be another one of those posts where someone talks about making something, gets all hyped up, takes it to 3 pages with talk of selling them, but never even makes anything haha.

But you are going through with it...and its looking good!!!

Hope it turns out good for ya. Doesnt matter if it takes you 200 hours... You didnt spend hundreds of bucks, it'll probably fit better even if you are new to fiberglass, and you'll have the satisfaction of doing it yourself!

looking forward to the finished product.

J.

 

Nice!!
Eager to see up dates!!

 

nice going, looking forward to seeing how the end product looks!

 

x2 with everyone else good work keep us updated

 

Yeah, I noticed that about this place.. alot of ideas but nothing done. I wasn't going to post any of this until I was totally done, but, with all the complaining about headliners in the last week I said I may as well put the mold portion up and show people there is hope. I have an IT background and no fabrication or car experience hardly ,and, although time consuming, it was actually really easy to do...barring those seatbelt housings.



If its anything like my well subwoofer box looks, we're in trouble...hahahaha...

 

Well, its been about a week and I pretty much fixed all my errors and learned alot. The main thing is if you don't have a roller for the fiberglass you better have a Dremel and some time to waste grinding and cutting those air bubbles out !

I also learned DO NOT make any holes in the mold until your are done. If you cut the light housing area out it can cause some cracks in the middle. Learned this the hard way too.
Best thing is that duct tape and some cardboard paper can fix these really easily.

I also lucked out on some headliner fabric from a local upholstery shop. The guy had an order of 5 x 6 x 1/8 medium grey for someone that hasn't picked it up since march. He sold it to me for 30 bucks and it matches great. In fact, I'll probably cover my sail panels in this as well to get a better match overall.


A user on here was selling some sun visors, so I'm waiting for them before I put the headliner fabric on..should have them next week..

 

I had a woman redo my headliner. She used black denim for the material, and it looks very nice. What material do you plan on using?

 

Its normal headliner fabric that I have. I looked around online and it seems that that the upholstery shop i bought it from sells identical material to a few different car interior places I saw it at. Its just a medium grey color with a 1/8 inch foam backing. Its not very exciting but its as close to stock as I could find.

 

I Have a Hard Top and Just spread Fiberglass resin on the headliner board and that seem to work great. You just have to make sure you keep it supported while working on it and that you don't leave runs on it.

JoAnn Fabric sells headliner material (complete with the foam backing) and Autozone (or other parts stores) sell the adhesive. You spray both the material and the board, wait until tacky, and stick. You will need an extra person or two (unless you're an octopus). When I was done, it looked like the factory 'liner.

 

The fiberglass resin works great. If I did it myself, I'd do the same thing. Without resin, it handles like a squid.

 

If you smooth out the fibre glass you could just paint it or paint it black and add a top layer of carbon fibre cloth.

 

I don't know if you could get it smooth enough. The fiber board is pretty fuzzy and looks like stubble when you're working the resin into it. But the foam backed material is pretty forgiving and hides most *reasonable* imperfections.

 

I have seen some people successfully use speaker cloth to cover the liner. It stretches out nicely around corners to prevent bunching. Looks professional.

 

Well, I finally got time to put my mold in the car today and came to find I have some fit issues. What I think happened is that the original paper mold I made might have lost its shape before I fiberglassed it. This could be from sitting in the hot, humid garage for a week. The whole thing just flattened out enough to make it look like crap inside the car, but not enough to tell with it outside the car. I'm glad I didn't use up my fabric on it.

So, back to the drawing board, unfortunately.

 

If you can find or happen to have the backing, i just used some standard grey fabric from joanns, not even "headliner" fabric and some spray adhesive. just made sure to smooth it out real good. it looks really good and only if you were REALLY looking would you be able to tell it has been redone or even that it is not the same fabric. cost about 5 bucks total.

 

I was going to attempt this myself except just fiberglass the cardboard instead of using the foil to make a separate mold. I do lots of cosplay like this and I think it always turns out really well. Then either fabric it or just smooth and paint for a hard headliner. I'll take pics if it doesn't end in disaster :P

 

Well, I should have done it this way. I was just too concerned w/ the fiberglass going all over the place. Even with the car's interior draped off, I'd still mess it up. My interior is in really good shape so that is why I decided to use my method.

My only real loss was time. My friend gave me a gallon of fiberglass for free. I had cloth left over in the garage and I bought 2 packs.. I wasn't really out much money.

 

You need to remove the headliner, then fiberglass it.

 

I didn't want to do mine in the car, but trying to take it out it flattened out too much. I think plan C is grab an OE headliner from the junkyard and stiffen it up. Either with a thin amount of fiberglass or just the resin, then put new fabric on.

 

You might wanna consider an ABS replacement. They can be painted, or covered, and they don't decay like the OEM ones.

 

Eh for 180 + 50 in shipping.. I can get by with a home brew option.. I paid less than that for the rolling chassis.

 

they are 149.00 with free shipping

 

Who has one for 149.00?

 

1a auto....those are the uncovered ones

the covered ones run 250.00

 

Are they covered, or flocked?

 

flocked?

the covered ones that are 250.00 are covered with foam backed material matched to our interiors. they will send you free color samples as well if you call them up to see what matches best

the uncovered version from them is 149.00 and you can either buy the material from them for 64 dollars and do it yourself or go to a fabric store and get something else.

 

OK There were some after market liners that had flocked material.. Glue is applied, and material dust for lack of a better description, is sprayed on to give it a felt appearance. I did this in wood shop back in school.

 

I dunno, I for one can't recommend the after market abs headliners. For 150 dollars they have a really crappy fit.

If you have a hard top they are probably fine, but with ttops, there is a large gap all the way around between the frame and the end of the headliner. It really annoys me. Looks good when you are inside the car but as soon as you stand over the car with the ttops out and look down it no longer looks all that good.

I'm going to be redoing mine eventually and probably fabricating my own in order to get a proper fit.

One other thing that I dislike about the aftermarket abs headliners, since they are ABS and stiff you supposingly don't need anything in the middle to hold it up (stock has the clips that hold it up in the front and the trim piece in the rear. But it couldn't be more wrong, you will need to rig something up to hold it up, the middle will sag because the ABS is not stiff enough to support it's own weight.

 

There is no way of supporting the middle part that sags?

 

You can make something work. I used some heavy duty velco strips. It doesn't take a whole lot to get the sag out, but without anything you do get a little bit of a sag in the middle above the mirror.

 

The interior light doesn't hold it up?

 

So if you use velcro you won't see the sagging you mentioned. It would be a good alternative to those who have nothing to work with.

 

the interior light holds mine up fine

 

Yes the interior light holds it up in the middle middle, but not in the front middle. The ABS is not stiff enough, it will sag in the front middle if you don't put something there to hold it up.

It's not a horrible sag, if you don't do anything about it, you will probably be the only person that knows about it. Anyone who rides with you unless they push up on it in the middle front above the mirror for some reason, will probably not realize it's sagging some.

The bigger flaw is the gaps around the ttop frame. You can't do anything about those. The gaps are big enough for me to fit my fingers through all the way around the ttop frame on both sides of the car. But if you don't mind the gaps, then yes they are a pretty good piece.

I seem to have this problem with all aftermarket products though, none of it fits very well even though it's supposed to be after market stuff specifically for these cars. I just replaced my carpet with the after market carpet that is supposed to be molded for a third gen, and I hate the fit. It looks ok, better than the 25 year old water damaged, oil soaked original stuff I had, but the fit leaves a lot to be desired. For example the foot rest pad on the drivers side, the molding there is way to wide, you can't get the carpet to the left far enough to keep from having a spot in the carpet that will depress about an inch before it hits floorboard. I have the foot rest pad partially coverred by the kicker trim piece, and this depressable part of the carpet is still there.

But I'm a little more picky about some of these things. A lot of people ordering this stuff are just doing it to make there car look a little better and be a little more drivable, where as I'm trying to restore my car and just find most of the aftermarket stuff not close enough to original fit for my tastes.

 

On the carpet thing, you can actually take a good steam cleaner and use it to somewhat reshape the carpet to fit the floor pan better. The problem with most aftermarket repops is that they have to find a PERFECT mold to make it from. But as many of us know, our cars are far from perfect anymore. 99% of repops need some sort of tweaking to get to fit right, thats just the nature of the business.

 

how are the 1a headliners? i just check them out, and it said they are "rolled up for shipping' AND ALLOW 24-48 hours after unboxing it to let it take its shape...

this frightens me.

 

Not bad, you just lay out in the sun and it regains shape

 

Final Project Update:

Well, its pretty much shelved for good. I was lucky enough to wrangle an original headliner in pretty decent shape for $40 bucks off of Craigslist over the weekend. I have to fix a small tear and then re-fabric it so its grey. It still even has the clips on the front!

What I learned from this whole adventure is that if you are going to make your own maybe you should fiberglass most of it IN the car. If you are going to use paper mache, don't wait a week to fiberglass it since gravity might have other plans for its shape. You'll probably want to do that the same day.

 

I went down to my local junk yard and for 5 dollars I picked up a mildly used headliner that was torn where the overhead light goes, but it had the clips and everything. I brought it home and used some RTV and epoxy to glue the two halves back together and also soaked it with Lysol since it smelled horrible. The next day I got some stretchy fabric the nice lady at Hobby Lobby suggested for 9 dollars with tax and using a stapler and some 3m spray adhesive... I have a whole new headliner!! yayy! With direct light you can kind of see the discoloration of the original headliner cardboard through it, but you'll never have that kind of light inside the car so I'm not at all worried about it.

 

You still can remove the fabric and paint the headliner black. Then cover it. I bet it would get rid of the see through stains.

 

I agree, you shouldnt cover over the old headliner material, it will just sag like the old stuff eventually.

 

I didn't cover the old material, the cardboard stuff is stained.

 

Now's the time man, paint the cardboard and recover it, or go over it again with an other layer of material.

 

Just hit it with some flat black. Mucch better.

 

Got the headliner all installed and it looks really good! I'm noticing a few gaps where I can see paint around the t-tops. I assume that's normal or its just a little saggy from being old.

 

I would like to see some pics if possible. I plan on doing my headliner in my RS sooner or later. Good job!