Classic car headliner and door panels

On a classic car, the seats get all the attention. They are what you see when you open the door, and what you touch every time you drive.

Two other pieces decide whether your interior reads as finished or almost finished. The headliner and the door panels.

Both go later than the seats. Both go differently. And almost nobody looks up classic car headliner problems until the cloth starts coming down over their head.

Your classic car headliner: two ways it was built

Before you work out why yours is dropping, it helps to know how it was holding up.

On American cars from the fifties and sixties, the headliner is sewn cloth. Hemmed channels, called listings in the shop manuals, run across the piece from side to side. Metal bows pass through them and clip into the roof rail. The cloth is then stretched and secured along the tack strips at the windshield, the back glass and the pillars.

On later cars the construction changes completely. The cloth arrives already laminated to a thin layer of polyurethane foam, and that assembly is bonded to a board moulded to the shape of the roof.

Two systems, two ways of finishing. The first holds by tension. The second holds by foam and glue.

What brings the cloth down over your head

On the bow-style build, tension is what gives up. The cloth relaxes, the stitching in the listings opens, or the edge attachment lets go. The cloth itself is often still there. It just stopped doing any work.

On the moulded-board build, the cloth is not what fails. The foam between the cloth and the board is.

Polyurethane foam ages badly in a cabin. Heat and humidity attack the polymer, the foam loses its cohesion, and it ends up as powder. The cloth has nothing left to hold onto. It comes down, and it comes down first where the cabin runs hottest, near the back glass.

There is one thing you can check right now without taking anything apart. Run your hand under the part that is hanging. If a fine dust falls out, the foam is finished. The glue letting go is the symptom; the foam turning to powder is the cause.

That is also why a piece pressed back up comes down again. The cloth is bonding to powder.

The board under your headliner decides the rest

Under the foam sits the board. Depending on the car and the year, that is pressed fibreboard, a fibreglass board, or a thermoplastic shell.

Pressed fibreboard drinks moisture. One leak past a windshield seal, a sunroof or the back glass, and it swells, distorts, and softens at the edges.

A distorted board will not give you a flat surface again. New cloth laid over it takes on the wave underneath, and that shows up in raking light on the first bright day. Which is why the board gets checked before the material is chosen, not after.

Fibreglass boards take it better. They move very little with heat and humidity, and on those cars the trouble stays in the foam and the glue rather than in the board. That is good news for your project: the piece falling on your head can be brought back flat with nothing structural to remake.

Your door panels: what happens behind the vinyl

A door panel is built the opposite way round from how most people picture it. The vinyl or cloth you see is stapled to a rigid backing, hardboard or pressed fibreboard depending on the model, and it is that backing which carries the clips.

Behind it, against the door skin, sits a moisture barrier. It is there because a car door is not watertight: water that gets past the window seal runs down inside the door and out through the drain holes at the bottom.

When that barrier is torn or missing, and it often is after a glass or a latch has been out, water reaches the backing directly. A fibre backing that drinks swells from the edge in. The bottom of the panel thickens, the material softens, and the clip holes open up.

What you see is a panel gapping at the bottom and a clip that no longer holds. You push it back, it pops out at the first slammed door. It is not the clip. It is the backing around the clip with no material left to bite into.

In the trade the practice is to start from a new backing once the board is that far gone, rather than trying to save a swollen one. The vinyl, the chrome strip and the topstitching carry across to the new backing when they are still good. And the moisture barrier goes back in, or the new backing ends up exactly like the old one.

What your interior gets when both pieces are remade

A headliner made new is a thin foam bonded to the board, then automotive cloth stretched and laid without a wrinkle. The tension is taken by hand, section by section, because headliner cloth does not forgive a crease. The crease stays.

Your door panels are recovered new, in vinyl or automotive cloth, with the piping and topstitching of the original pattern when the project calls for it. Or with a layout that never existed at the factory, if that is what you want for your car.

On a Mustang as on any other classic, the two pieces are worked together. Headliner and panels share the same material, the same grain and the same thread, or the cabin reads as two halves and the eye catches on it. Annie works on any classic model, faithful to the original or custom to your own vision.

The rest is less impressive. The usual wait before a new project starts is four weeks and up, depending on the season. Some shades and grains have to be ordered in, and a supplier who keeps a material in small quantity sets his own calendar. A panel sometimes wants an adjustment after you have driven with it for a few weeks. That is part of the work.

Catalogues and shop manuals call these two pieces interior trim, or garniture intérieure in French, which is the term you will run into while hunting for parts. In a Quebec garage the word is trim, and trim is what Annie does on your car.

The detail of the work is on the classic car interior restoration page. For a Mustang, the Mustang trim page runs through the same list piece by piece.

Measuring and patterning happen on your car, in your garage, before a single piece is cut. Custom rembourrage and trim, workshop by appointment, Montreal's Rive-Nord, with travel out to Laval, the Laurentides and Lanaudière. The conversation and the work happen in French.