As you might expect, the door pockets were bowed badly, the armrest drooped into the pocket and the bottom mounting flange was warped. Rather than replace them when the interior was redone, they just put new carpet with a leather trim piece on the old pockets....didn't even do that very well.
After unscrewing the 2" long drywall screws that held them to the door, this is what I was starting with:
Awesome, yeah?
Never being a fan of the part of the door pockets that extended forward under the speaker grille, I decided to modify them and cut that part of the piece off. Then carefully removed the new carpet and leather trim (easy because the glue they used was terrible) uncovered a pretty sad door pocket:
Considering the cost of new pockets, I wanted to see if there was anything you could do with his odd material with an almost tar-like consistency. Using the scraps I heated them with a heat gun and they got malleable. At 300F you could easily bend the material. Any hotter and it blistered and smoked. Decided to stick to 280F - 290 F just for a bit of safety and to not risk damaging the ancient pockets. So, using aluminum angles, various aluminum forms I made and the workbench I set about trying to reshape them like so:
Also figured out that you have to let the material cool to room temp slowly. If you cool it quickly with compressed air, it did not hold its shape. Also had to repair the broken and missing areas so did that with 0.040" aluminum and a bit of JB Weld especially around the mounting holes:
After cleaning up the repairs, cutting the front of the pocket at the correct angle and making a new part to close off the front of the pocket, they looked like this:
Outta pic space so will have to continue in the next post.