Will post an update here at each milestone. For past couple months I've been working on re-do of the interior of my Classic - limited to 8 or so hours per weekend so its taking me a bit of time. If there's any interest in what I have learned, I'll be happy to write up some of this or all of it in a step-by-step, and/or link to where others have already described how to do some of it.
A while back I had redone all the woodwork, so my intentions with this was to bring the rest of the interior up to date
-replace headliner
-fix rust and rhino-line the foor
-get seat leather fixed and re-dyed
-upgrade the stock stereo
-fix all broken plastic panels
-since a lot of jb weld is being employed to fix plastic, and color matching plastic panels is hard, I'm changing the color scheme of the interior to a dark charcoal grey for leather and vynil, and lower half of dash. Floor, headliner, top of dash and everything else is going to be black.
Ultimately i have plans for an interior roll cage, which will probably mean altering with some of what I have planned to get done in this phase. Anyway, here is what has been done so far, and I have attached some pics.
1. pulled out entire interior
2. began repair of broken plastic pieces, like under-seat boxes. Pulled apart center console cubby box and reinforced w steel bars.
3. repaired floor rust including cutting out and custom shaping a panel for the passenger foot well
4. pulled a rats nest of wiring out of the passenger door to get wiring sorted out for new stereo (when replacing door panel a couple years back I created this mess)
5. removed all old amplifier, speakers, and stereo wiring harness pieces as well as wiring from stereo to center console, stereo to both amps, and amps to speakers
6. filled in all the body drain holes, cut off carpet stud screws from the 2nd row, load space and tailgate. going to dye the original front carpet mats black and use them when not offroading, so keeping the front carpet studs.
7. primed raw metal and then scuffed/prepped the entire floor. cleaned up with acetone.
8. applied two good coats of herculiner to the floor, which has now finished curing and I think the end result is awesome.
With the above done, the hardest work is complete. I am having the headliner professionally recovered, and the seats and steering wheel professionally re-dyed. This will all cost me $650, but they will be perfect. So from here on in it will be cleaning, repairing, and painting interior panels, and slowly putting it all back together and installing new stereo.
See pics - let me know what you think!
fixed rusted passenger floor panel
Interior gutted except dash
Herculiner - loadspace
Herculiner - tailgate
Herculiner - transmission shift panel
comparison of before and after colors for interior panels
