saablog

Yesterday I started my headliner replacement project. I was tired of my head rubbing on the mildew-colored fabric near the driver’s door opening each time I got in or out of the car.

I picked up Luisa from daycare, and we stopped at the fabric store and bought new headliner material. They had several colors (black, maroon, dark blue, dark gray, forest green, tan) but tan was the only suitable color for my taupe interior. Luisa was pretty interested in the fabric store but she was trying to touch every fabric in the entire store and it drove me crazy.

After dinner, Ani had to go to school for Open House, and Luisa helped me begin taking the headliner out of the car. It consists of a foam-backed material [poorly] glued to a shaped fiberboard backing. That means it can be removed from the car for recovering. The first step was to remove the grab handles, sun visors, rearview mirror, and light. Then the C-pillar and B-pillar trims needed to be removed as well, which required removing the upper seat belt guides and the rear window latches. I’ll recover the C-pillar trims too since they are of the same construction as the headliner, and are also sagging. Luisa took this picture of me.

After Luisa went to bed, I returned to the garage and set to work removing the sunroof. The inside of the sunroof needs to be removed as well since it is also covered in sagging headliner material.  Removing the headliner and sunroof gave me access to the sunroof drains, so I cleared both of the front drains. The front drain hoses had been reinforced with and internal plastic spiral-wrap, which really reduced the inside diameter of the drain hose and also created an internal corrugation for debris to get caught in. I decided to remove these silly things from both front drains. Here is a phot of the removed headliner- yuck.

The sunroof interior panel was pretty difficult to remove, as the instructions in my guide and online didn’t show me how to loosen the rear guides after loosening their mounting bolts. Oh well, it’s out now.

This morning I decided to pull out the seats and have the both front seat bottom skins re-sewn. The center section of the driver’s seat ripped several months ago, and the side sections of the passenger seat recently began to rip out. Taking out the passenger seat allowed me to see how the skins are supposed to be installed, and I discovered that a portion of the driver’s seat attachment was embedded in the driver’s seat pad. Knowing that, I removed the part so I can properly reinstall the skins after they are sewn. At the same time, that embedded attachment hardware had severed one of the seat heater wires, whch is why the driver’s seat heater doesn’t work. I will repair that damaged wire in the hopes that it will restore functionality of the seat heater.

So far I’m $29.93 into this project. I still need to have the seats sewn, and I need to buy the adhesive. The next part is going to be the messiest- removing the old headliner fabric and its disintegrated foam backing from the form. I’ll be sure to write about it after it is done.