Update on Re-do of my 1991 Classic interior

[hermanpj]

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

[ArmyRover]

Did you use the plastic/vinyl dye for the dash parts?

[hermanpj]

heres what i'm doing on plastic pieces. after cracks fixed, scuffing them with a 3M pad, then cleaning with windex. then i spray them with KleanStrip Bulldog Adhesion Promoter. Then I am spraypainting them with Duplicolor Plastic & Vynil paint.

Vynil is getting same treatment as above cleaned with Acetone.

[ArmyRover]

cool I'm curious to hear how that holds up

[Funrover]

Looks good man!

[hermanpj]

the shop that is redoing my leather seats said they swear by bulldog adhesion promoter to make a huge difference when recoloring plastic. will keep updating this so you'll know if i get a bad result.

[ArmyRover]

cool let us know if this works it may be time for some updating in my interior as well

[hermanpj]

Updates

Fixed about 100 cracks in the brittle plastic dashboard pieces. Sanded down the JBWeld and have prepped most of the plastic for repainting. Pretty boring stuff, but one neat side project I completed:

If you cannot see the hands of your RRC clock at night, and the light bulb is fine, you can repaint the hands with glow in the dark paint.
-pry clock out of the furniture and disconnect
-remove the flat steel springs by prying gently with a flat screw driver to remove spring end from the trim ring that surrounds the clock face
-slide the springs off of the back of the clock
-insert screw driver into plastic locking tab on side of clock and twist lightly to disengage one side. repeat on other
-extract mechanism from clock housing
-use tweezers to gently remove second hand, minute hand and hour hand from the clock mechanism. apply the tweezers as close to the axis of rotation as possible as the hands will snap apart if you are not careful
-gently sand the hour and minute hands
-get glow in the dark paint from a hobby store or gun smith
-i used Tamaya 'stop light red' hobby paint to repaint the second hand
-the hour and minute hands will require several coats of glow in the dark paint depending on thickness of the paint you use. mine took 5 coats to have a uniform green glow
-check that the axle hole in each hand is not full of paint, use a drill bit to clean them out
-reassmble

photos dont do this justice so i didnt include. However I think it made a big difference. clock looks like a new unit. this project cost about 10 bucks for supplies and takes a couple hours mostly due to waiting for paint drying time.

[stolenheron]

wow you did alot, reguardless of whether they did "justice" i'd still love to see it.

[hermanpj]

unfortunately glow in the dark pics dont come out at all. regular pics just look like a brand new clock.

[yieldsign2]

Damn, stealing my thunder. I bedlinered the interior as well, havent' gotten it back together yet though.

Looks great!

[hermanpj]

mine's not back together either. every weekend i take more things apart to fix. like a compulsive disorder...

[ArmyRover]

I'm working on changing all my interior parts out from tan to gray and it's not a compulsive disorder, it's actually more of self inflicted torture chamber with doors and tires.

[hermanpj]

Update 11-4-07

Finished repair of several interior panels. These have all been dissasembled and all cracked plastic repaired. Each piece then sanded, cleaned, sprayed with adhesion promoter, and finally sprayed with several coats of interior spray paint. You can see the color scheme I'm going with here: Dashboard above the wood will be semi gloass black. Everything below the wood panel will be charcoal grey. This will extend to the interior in general. Headliner will be in black fabric. Seats will be matching charcoal grey.


Close up of lower dashboard pieces


Dashboard is partially re-assembled.

[ArmyRover]

Looks freaking awesome man... Damn you now I'm going to have to try this since I'm tearing mine apart for the interior swap anyways. O'well it's just some extra work here and there.