The fabric on my headliner, sunshades, and rear speaker covers was stained and dirty. I decided while I was home from college to fix that ugly ****. This was my first time reupholstering, but I think I did a fairly good job and learned a lot of stuff for the next time I attempt it. For a few bucks and a few minutes, you can make your old **** look like new. This is as opposed to spending hundreds for a new headliner, sunshades, etc.

In any event, it's quite easy to do. I found the hardest part was figuring out how to remove the headliner without breaking anything or much of anything. Here's a great tip. Always mark where your screws came from when taking **** apart. I now have 2 screws that I have no idea where they came from because I did not mark every single screw (or set of screws).

First, some of the tools I used to get the job done. 3M General Trim Adhesive is what I used, and we'll see how long it lasts. Sissors for cutting the fabric. I used hot glue with a hot glue gun though you could certainly use something else. If you use hot glue, though, be sure to wear gloves or something. I found out hot glue is a tad bit hotter than hot wax when it touches your skin. Last, a seam ripper for getting the old seams out of the sun visors.

Oh yeah, and the original color was that tan, I forget the "official" gm name, but it's ugly crap. I changed my rear speaker covers to black (I figured, speakers = black coloring, makes it look good right?). I found black fabric for that but kept the headliner and sunshades as close to the original color as possible.

Here are the tools:


The speaker cover on the left is not yet wrapped around the back. The one on the right is finished.


After applying adhesive (and letting it sit for half an hour or longer), I cut the fabric with about half an inch margin. This is the back of the rear speaker covers. As you can see, I hot glued it to the back.


Here's the completed set of rear speaker covers. Looks ****ing sharp!


Here is the headliner after applying the adhesive and putting the fabric on. Just waiting for most of the adhesive to dry at this point.


I used clothespins to hold down the fabric until I was sure both the hot glue and adhesive were fine.


I finished all the hot glueing and everything. Just waiting for everything to dry and make sure it sticks well. Notice I used a margin of about 1 inch on the headliner rather than half an inch as on the rear speaker covers. Also, I did a diagonal cut to get the fabric that covered the dome light hole out of the way.


I took pictures of the finished products as installed in the car, but unfortunately I don't have them with me yet. If anyone wants to see what it looks like in my car let me know.

 

Looks like you did a pretty good job!

 

I need to redo mine so badly Looked great for 1 day then the heat got to it

 

That looks very good. We did my friends headliner last weekend and we did an ok job, but I think yours looks much more professional than ours. We messed up a bit doing the inner corners, cut a little too much. But next time we do it, we'll get it right.

 

Took some more pictures today, of the headliner, sunshades and rear speaker covers installed. My digital camera isn't the best, so some images look pretty poor. However I think you get the idea.

I plan to convert my interior to grey/graphite color. I think it'll look hot with black and grey mixed elegantly.

By the way, yeah I also messed up on the corners a little bit. Damn **** is hard to cut and so forth. Anyway I'm extremely happy with how it all turned out considering it was my first attempt. Next time, of course, it'll be perfect.

Rear of the headliner, installed.


Front of the headliner, with sunshades installed.


Rear speaker covers, also known as sails:


I took the passenger's side sunshade off so I could take a picture of it. Looks so much better than before. Only one problem, I think I broke the clutch taking them out the first time because they don't stay where I put them as before.

 

3M also makes Fast Tack Trim Adhesive, so you don't have to wait so long for the glue to set up before applying the material.

 

Hey how is the 3M adhesive holding up?? Is it like the foam type of adhesive that is used to adhere the cloth to the foam on the headliner?? Do you live in a hot climate like Florida??
I live in Florida and I have made several attempts to repair my headliner while it was still on the car. I used a spray adhesive that said it holds up to humidity, but it didn't. I have now pulled the headliner, and I am looking for a similar adhesevie to what was on it before. So, far the 3M trim adhesive seem to be the only heat stable adhesive on the market, but the kind I have also says it will hold up to heat.
Nice job on your interior, looks good:hail:

 

All of that rocks man... excellent job.

You have inspired me to start on my car.
Just need a few quick questions answered.

-That is the original headliner board, correct?
-What condition was it in, is it really fragile?

-What kind of fabric did you use?
-How much did you buy (in yards)

-What order did you remove the headliner board? From the front of the car, to the back, or from the back of the car to the front.. or does it not matter?

-Any suggestions. What tips would you give me(or anyone else)?

 

i did the old fashoned way of fixing my headliner... I tore that **** out!!! lol

 

Hello,
The adhesive is still holding up, and it seems to be working well, so far! I can't detect any sagging or anything, so looks like I got the right adhesive! I live in Belfast, Maine and go to school in Rochester, NY. Not very hot climates during the summer, be we occasionally see 90s-upper 90s. I took a picture of the adhevise I used, I believe it was "3M General Use Trim Adhesive" or something like that, I got it at Advance Auto Parts.

I did take the whole headliner out to work on it, obviously as the pictures show. You can do a much better job that way and why not do it right the first time?

 

Hey,

Yeah, that is the original headliner board. I just unscrewed whatever was in the way and took it out. Then I ripped off all the old fabric. It was pretty fragile, I tore it (but didn't completely break it) in a few places, just used duct tape on those. Otherwise, no one sees the headliner board so just fix it up and cover it with fabric. Will save you a lot of time and effort looking for one in the junkyard or where ever.

I went to Marden's and just bought a few yards of some random fabric (just looking for closest color + texture match). I bought 2 yards of 70" fabric or thereabouts. I bought 1 yard square for the rear sails. If you measure them, you should come out to something close to that.

It doesn't really matter what order you remove the headliner in, because the last thing to take off is the dome light. Also, you have to remove a lot of other stuff just to get the headliner out decently.

The most important suggestion I can give you off the top of my head is MAKE SURE YOU MARK WHERE EVERY SINGLE SCREW COMES FROM. I did this partly, but not fully, and now am stuck with 2 screws I have no idea where the hell came from. Spent a lot of time trying to figure out where they came from and just eventually gave up.

Hope that helps.

 

hey, did you also recover your sunvisors? if so how did you do it? Thanks.

Mike

 

One thing I discovered while installing a new headliner... For the screws that are holding the molding up (the A-pillar pieces, or the plastic ones by the door jams, or the plastic interior trim), when you unscrew a piece, take the piece out and put the screw right back in the hole. So the screw is still in its original spot, but you can work without the molding there. Saved me a lot of headache.

 

Looks good dude, wish like hell i would have thought of that clothespin thing when i did mine.

 

Nice work. I also did my headliner but I am having a hard time with the visor as far as sewing it is concerned, any tips.

 

My experience with the sunvisors not holding still but rather falling down when I hit a bump showed me that the mounting rod that it slides on was free-spinning inside the mount. The d/s was always fine but the p/s always slipped. So when I redid all the interior upholstery recently I found this shaft spinning. I used a lillte bit of POR15 seam maker, and carefully "welded" the rod in place to the triangle mount, no more problems.

As far as all these headliner regluing, that are not holding up, when I used to do this on my old GP, I had the same problem, but now I know that it was not holding up bc I was trying to attach it to old crusty foam. Obviously this will not stick, I don't know if some people are scraping the old foam off, or not but that might be a reason why so many are coming undone.

 

looks good! I just did mine . I used a bunch of binder clips - they really grip, but I put too much glue in a few spots, and you can see where the clip pressed in. I'll remember the clothes pins if I do this again.

I used that adhesive - good stuff. I also used 3M super 77 spray adhesive for the sail panels. So far so good. It's not as strong of stuff but should hold. Just for sure I left really big margins on the back of panels/ headliner for more gripping surface and less sag.

I'm still working on the visors. I found that if you clamp two rulers across where you want a seam, you sew pretty straight and can evenly space stiches by aiming for each 1/8" mark.

Just thought I'd share

 

Why glue it when you could stable it? Wouldn't those hold up to the warmer climates easier?

 

Umm...because staples look very very very very TACKY!



I hope you were just being sarcastic......

 

No, I think he has a point. Use the staples on the underside (topside) of the headliner where noone will see it, to hold the edges down. You would need some short staples so they don't poke through the visible side though.

 

It looks like you had the same problem with stretching the material around the inside corners of the headliner just like I did. I found out the hard way that recovering a t-top headliner is MUCH more difficult than a hardtop headliner.

 

They is a certain tool I saw at Classic Industries for headliner repair. It is part No. A7672 and the description reads "Headliner and Upholstery Tool:

Great for tucking headliner or upholstery material into tedious channels without damaging the material. When replacing your upholstery or headliner be sure you have all the necessary tools. This tool helps you to evenly tuck the excess materials into the correct channels giving your finished job a clean, professional look. Easy to use around curves and near corners.

Make Headliner installation easier by using the right tools!". It sells for $8.50 at their website.

 

yeah those inside corners i couldnt figure out either. i had to patch a piece there.

how does that corner look with the t-tops off?

 

do you guys think 54" WIDE X 9 FT LENGTH will be enough to recover my headliner, sunvisors, and sail panels?

Mike

 

Definitly.

I think I only had a 5' by 2 1/2' piece and it worked fine.

Especially if you have T-tops, because you have a rectangular peice, then you cut it into an I shape, and the left over pieces cover the speakers perfectly.

-Eric

 

For all you do-it-yourself-ers, this is some 'encouragement' for you to pay special attention to your headliner.

I had mine 'professionally' recovered in December. In these two pictures, you can see what a poor job was done. Note how the corners of the t-tops were stitched in. Initially, they didn't cover that part at all. They cut the fabric incorrectly and it looked like a triangle shape 'hole' where just the board was showing through. Also note how poorly the fabric matched my stock visors.

 

Here is another picture. You can see the stitching again in this. And also notice how the shell was ruined and it detached from the car. I had to look at that every time the tops were off. *** bless ABS headliners!

 

It looks good.

Here is a tip:

Use popsicle sticks to help hold the edges of the fabric down, underneath of the cloths-pins. You will use 50% less pins and will help avoid the "serrated" look when done.

 

Having done this with a hardtop backing board, the problem might be more pronounced than with T-top liners.... but after recovering a original fiberglass backing board I noticed a slight 'unevenness'. When I laid down the cloth, I spread it out by hand, trying to keep things as even as possible. But dispite that and the inerent unevenness of the backing board I think it shows thru somewhat. Is there any way to eliminate, or at least minimize this to get to to look as smooth as possible?

Thanks!

 

If you have the right material stretching it around the corners and making it look nice shouldn't be a problem at all. Especially for a upholstery shop. Those pics above are pretty sad for a professional shop to do that. Most shops should at least tell you that it won't match exactly or that you should have the speaker covers and the sun visors covered at the same time so that they all match. It would be pretty hard to match something that is old, faded, and stained but above looks quite a bit off.

 

Thank you very much BTS88IROC. I agree. I've become quite a fan of diy after my negative experiences.

 

i redid mine like 3 years ago.. but in white. BIG MISTAKE!! over 1/2 the **** is black/dirty. so i need to find something close to tourch red and re do mine next weekend (polsihing the rims of my bike this weekend)

 

I dont got any pictures yet.

But I took off the hold fabric, and then hot glued on the new stuff at the the seems,

Then actually covered that in adhesive spray and let it soak through


With surgical gloves I made sure the new fabric was completely flat and such covered the old headliner board.

once that fabric was in place, it was much eaiser to attach the other "headliner" fabric with pre-foam backing.

Overall cleaner process.

 

i have a question, i need to reedo my headliner, but the thing is actually missing some pieces. the bigest one is one inch by four inchs along one of the tops, is there any substance i can use as a substitue and just glue it to the original material? any segustions would be helpfull

 

You should probably buy a new board completely.

If not, I imagine cardboard would do the trick, but you may not be satisfied in the end.

For money saving purposes I say give it a shot, the worst that could happen is it ends up workng well.

 

In the past 4 years, I had my T-top headliner done professionally (or so they said) and did it myself last year.
I have my tops off all the time. What is a great fabric to use that will last more then a year without fading and cracking?
I live in Houston so if anyone knows a shop that can actually do a professional job, I sure don't mind paying............

 

Has anyone tried using a vinyl type material on the headliner? I'm considering it, but am thinking that it'll have even less stretchability when it gets to those corners around the T-tops. I've done a headliner on my old car before (non-thirdgen) and it was a real pain. The adhesive failed on the first attempt so i redid it using a stronger adhesive. after about a year that failed too. The best advice I have is to do the prep work well! Clear away any residue on the board to give the best surface for adhesion.

 

JeremyNYR - I've actually thought about doing this, especially if you have leather/vinyl seat covers. I imagine it would be tricky, but in you warm up the vinyl a bit, it should stretch some - probably enough to get around the curves.

 

Kerry, that's exactly what i was thinking with warming it up. I was thinking I could warm it to help stretch it and then hold it down in place for an extended period of time. Maybe repeat the process a few times if needed before adhering it. Also, this is a bit off topic but i want to mention it anyway. I went to a junkyard today and pulled some interior parts just before the firebird went into the crusher. I got a full set of black interior panels, a new radio pod because mine was in pretty lousy shape, and a dashpad that's in pretty good shape... no cracking and not faded, just needs cleaning up. I already have a good one myself but couldn't let it die. If anyone is interested in it (especially in the western ny area) let me know. I'll probably post a classified ad sometime soon.