Shop wanted $400 to replace the 50 year old fabric headliner in one of my cars. It was very discolored and stained but only had one small 1" tear. I masked the edges and did two coats of oil base Kilz with some tint to color match. Worked great - strengthened and stiffened the fabric and looks practically new. You can still see the fabric pattern. Hopefully it really will prevent stains from coming back thru. It even sealed over the little torn spot.
My old Chevy had a headliner that was always sagging and laying on my head. I tried pins, staples, apuolstry tacks, and even poked a few holes and shut glue under it. All these things would work for a few months, and soon the thing was hanging again. One day I just ripped it out of the car right to the bare metal. The metal is painted, so that is a far better ceiling. Someone told me it would be cold in winter. Sure the metal is cold, but the car still heats up fine. At last now, it's not dangling in my face and irritating me.
my 1999 plymouth voyagers head liner failed, its a very thin piece of fabric originall glued to foam thats glued to cardboard.
so i pulled off the fabric exposing the foam. looks fine, except moving the visiors makes for a bit of foam shedding but its not worth spending hundreds for a new head liner.
the fabric peeled off easily.
the failure is really the foam falling apart..... from age
Yeah, my '88 Celebrity had the foam. Can't remember exactly why, but when I pulled the falling fabric headliner off, I scraped the foam off the cardboard with a putty knife. Lots of vacuuming Then I painted the cardboard with some extra white latex I had laying around. Looked pretty good - like cardboard painted with white latex.
Yeah, the modern cars have that foam backed fabric glued to a backer board. I redid one of those in an S-10 pickup with the proper material. Fairly easy. These old car headliners that are just stretched fabric are a real bitch to do properly. I tried doing one and it looked like hell so I took it to an upholstery shop to redo and they made it look right. But that's pricey and I was looking to avoid it this time, esp since the old stuff was still all in one piece, just stained.
I'd try liquid nails panel adhesive. That stuff is wicked.
A couple vehicles ago, I had a sky light, that I didn't like. After trying several other ways to cover it, I masked, and then used black spray paint. The next owner was the wrecking yard, and they didn't complain.
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Yeah, the modern cars have that foam backed fabric glued to a backer board. I redid one of those in an S-10 pickup with the proper material. Fairly easy. These old car headliners that are just stretched fabric are a real bitch to do properly. I tried doing one and it looked like hell so I took it to an upholstery shop to redo and they made it look right. But that's pricey and I was looking to avoid it this time, esp since the old stuff was still all in one piece, just stained.
Reminds me of my 64 mustang I had in mid 70's I made a sort of drop ceiling, where I put up surround speakers using matrixing. I don't think I ever saw ceiling speakers anywhere else.
Greg
I didn't think any Voyagers would last long enough for the foam/plastic to fail. Mine certainly didn't.
It's like trying to glue a piece of paper to the sand, more "sand" just keeps letting go and it falls down. You have to scrape all the old dried out foam off it for any adhesive to stick more then a few minutes/days.
That's an interesting idea. There are places in some cars where there might be just enough room between the fabric and outer roof panel to get at least some thin tweeters in there hidden behind the fabric.
The best headliner I ever saw was in my 75 Fury, the headliner was perfect after 30 years but the body was beat all to hell. O_o
TDD
I still see a couple of 1984-85 Voyageur/caravan magic-wagons running around up here in the snow belt.
That's the same thing my chevy had. But that foam was real sticky and was getting all over everything. I first removed just the cloth, but I could not deal with that sticky foam. That's when I just removed everything. I was considering covering the ceiling with some thin carpeting glued on, but it's worked fine with just the bare metal for about 4 years now. The car is old, but still runs. That's all that matters to me. I'd rather save the money for getting a newer car eventually, rather than spending it on the headliner, which really serves no purpose anyhow.
My '85 was done in '92 and my '90 didn't make it anywhere close to Y2K. Neither rolled over 100K before they had to be put out of my misery. The '85 had terminal engine problems (head gaskets mostly) and the '90 had rotted out shock towers. OTOH, they were the only Chryslers that I didn't have any transmission troubles with (both were manuals). Junk, all.
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