Headliner Project: Not for Purists (or perfectionists)

[Don Plumley]

After cutting out the sunroof box and welding in the sunroof panel, the inside of my roof looked like this:



I painted the roof it a bit when I painted the half-cage, but with the sides exposed, it was pretty raw. For a pure track-rat, that would be okay -- but I'm driving this one to the track and wanted something to cover it up so a casual observer might not notice.

What to do? Factory headliner is like $750, and probably wouldn't fit under the main hoop of the half-cage if I were insane enough to spend that much. So armed with a big piece of vinyl headliner material and a can of 3M Super-Strength adhesive, I set out to create a headliner. Warning: Purists or Perfectionists should not read further. Serious Hack-o-Matic at play...

The plan was to use the glue in three parallel stripes, kinda like the support rods, then glue the rest edges of the roof, and tuck the edges of the vinyl under the window seals. I started by gluing to the front of the roof, then used the sun visors and their hardware to hold the vinyl in place as I worked towards the rear of the car.



The brown stripe is masking paper to keep the glue off the window. The 3M glue is fantastic. You coat both surfaces, wait 5 minutes to one hour, then press together. You can peel back and reposition, etc. To fasten the vinyl around the door edges, I removed the seals (which were replaced with new) as recommended here, used binder clips to hold in place. These were hardly needed as the glue had great holding ability. After getting everything more or less glued into place, I trimmed the edges and tucked under the window seals:



So how did it turn out? Just Okay bordering on Awful. The four corners have big folds in the vinyl that are really ugly. Fortunately they are either under the sun visors or pretty well hidden by the cage when you sit in the car. There are some lumps, bumps, sags and bias in the roof that does not look so great. I have no idea how well or how long the center "glue supports" will hold the vinyl in place. But for $16.00 in Vinyl and $15.00 in glue, to the casual observer or from in the cockpit with a helmet on your head, it should do just fine. YMMV.

Now on to the RS Carpet Kit...

[GeorgeK]

"YMMV"
Well, yes. This is 40$ of headliner vinyl, and 12 hours of work. It can be done. You may wat to reconsider, before the windows are in, and it drives you crazy forever.

[Dan in Pasadena]

Originally posted by Don Plumley
....a Factory headliner is like $750....

Don,

Kudos on the effort...I applaud your taking it on. Gotta comment though, I don't know where you got that price from! I bought a Ivory vinyl headliner (with sunroof in my case) from
Autos International of San Diego at last Fall's German Autofest in Ventura for the show price of $55. Its a lot more if you buy it from them regularly. I had a local guy install it for me for $160. He ran into some hassle with it, took much more time but stood behind his price. I tipped him an extra $25. Still only $240 total. All I did was drop it off and pick it up. One guy DID quote me $50 for the install - I simply went to another guy. They're out there if you look.