saablog

On Friday afternoon I finished stitching the metal upholstery rods to the bottom of the driver's seat upholstery, and also reinstalled the upholstery onto the seat. That involved pliers, clips, pulling, and scraped knuckles. I eventually got the seat together and both of the seats installed.

Here is the upholstery with the wire stitched on. Green circles are where the clips go through the cushion (see below). The red circles are where clips attach to the bottom of the seat after the upholstery has been pulled over the rear of the seat-bottom cushion. The orange circles are where the perimeter upholstery-support wire is secured to the bottom-front of the seat.

Here are the locations where the clips (below) pass through the seat cushion to attach to the web under the seat bottom.

These are the clips that are used for the above upholstery attachment.

The finished product, before I trimmed the zip-ties attached at the orange circle location from the first photo. 

 On Friday evening I finally was able to recover the sunroof headliner with new material. I ended up using the existing front and rear mounting strips, though I reversed them as the rear strip was in better shape. I used double-sided tape to affix the material to the strips, and additionally I stitched the rear strip in several locations, while the front strip relies on the four screws that hold the sunroof assembly together.

On Saturday I reinstalled the sunroof and was done. It was quite a challenge for me to get the sunroof parts back in, especially attaching the outer panel to the inner panel.  Unfortunately I don't have photos of the headliner with me, so I'll have to post those later. In any case, the project is complete and I"m pretty happy with how it turned out.

By the way... the 900 made it to Portland without incident. I'm having fun with it.

After getting much of the car disassembled last week on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, I took the seat bottom skins to the Shoe Repair/Leather Sewing store. I got them back on Thursday for $15 plus tax, so $16.79 total. Great.

On Wednesday I also cleaned off the headliner shell. First I peeled off the old headliner material, and then I used a deck-cleaning brush to get all of the old adhesive off of there. It was a yucky mess. I'd scrub, then vacuum, then scrub, then vacuum.

ON Thursday afternoon I after picking up the seat covers, I came home and decided to glue the headliner material on myself, without any help from Ani. The spray adhesive didn't come out as cleanly as I would have liked, it was more of a stream rather than an evenly-dispersed spray. (When Ani came home she said my results would have been better if I had somehow cleaned the spray head to better disperse the glue). It was a bit of a mess, and I got some wrinkles around some of the more contoured edges, but overall it came out pretty good. About what I would have expected with me doing it... I ended up using my office stapler to staple the material around the edges on the back side, the fiber shell was thick enough that the staples didn't come through.

After doing that, I decided to do the same for the C-pillar trim, as I wanted to reinstall the headliner but the C-pillar trim is what holds the headliner up in the back. Ani arrived home while I was gluing the second one and raised her eyebrows a bit at my nonconventional taping of the material on the back side (as well as the glue pattern) but it came out OK. She helped me get it installed that night, enough that it would stay in place.

Luisa helped me put the rest of the fittings (visors, handles, seatbelts) in on Saturday morning, then we went to Cle Elum. On Sunday afternoon I trimmed out the sunroof opening, and on Sunday evening I got the skin back on the passenger seat. The driver seat is going to be a bit trickier since the upholstery wire tabs have ripped off of the bottom of the seat.

The last big sticking point will be upholstering the sunroof panel. The upholstery is held on at the front and rear each by one long plastic clip which is sewn across the length of the sun roof. The front clip is broken, and both of them are very brittle so I'm afraid they won't stand up to the sewing machine. I may have to reassemble it without upholstery for a while until I can source the clips.

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.