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How to fix sagging headliner in car...

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Just rip the fabric off and get some spray paint that looks about like the interior of the car. Then paint the cardboard backing.

I did this once on car that didn't have a cloth headliner. It was cardboard backing with a thin sheet of textured vinyl glued to it. The vinyl was cracking off, so I pulled the headliner and painted the vinyl. I didn't use spray paint through, I mixed two outdoor paints together to get the color that I was looking for, and painted it with a brush. It looked so good, you wouldn't have known that it wasn't supposed to look that way.
 
What you want to do is remove the headliner (usually easy after removing a couple of plastic trim pieces), and do the following in steps:

1. Once headliner is out of car, carefully pull back the fabric/material covering the foaming
2. Inspect the foam underneath for tears, loose fragments, etc..
3. Spray foam with 3M Super 77 spray on adhesive (can be found at Home Depot, Lowes) about $8 a can.
4. Slowly lay the cover back on the foam and apply light pressure (just rub your palm over it, to seal it) to the cover from the center outward.
5. Let it sit a couple of hours
6. Reinstall headliner

Hope this helps 😀😀
 
Originally posted by: sward666
Is it a VW? Every Rabbit or Golf I've ever sat in has had that problem.
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I had a rabbit gti w/a sagging headliner. I sold it before it was fixed. It looked like Krap.
 
Originally posted by: boyRacer
The heavy rain just made it worse and its actually touching my head now which is so damn annoying... i wanna rip it off but i don't want the foam underneath to be exposed... how much will it usually cost to get it fixed by an upholstery place? I don't have the time to disassemble the things holding it and get a repair kit... Hope it's not more than $150... 🙁
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This will cost only a few bucks - get yourself a spray bottle put water in it and spray the headliner with mist. reshape it, next take some spray starch aeresol(sp?) can and spray the headliner.
 
The reason they usually fall is that the foam, not the glue, deteriorates. You would want to scrape off all the foam with a fairly stiff brush. It will probably crumble into dust. Then, you can spray adhesive evenly over the fiberboard, let it get tacky for a couple minutes so liquid adhesive doesn't soak through the fabric, and then put the fabric back. If you're feeling artistic, go to a fabric store and pick out something new.

The alternate plan that I'm hatching in my mind to get some inch-wide veneer strips from a wood-working store and work those into place width-wise, about a foot apart, tucked under the plastic trim at the ends. They would bend upward to fit the contour of the ceiling. They would be held in place by compression. Some kind of plastic strips might also work, but they'd need to have the right mix of stiffness and flexibility. Beware, I've never tried this or seen it done, but I see it in my head, and it just might work, and be a lot easier than re-gluing the fabric.
 
I had a local place quote me $80 to have my truck done when I had it, and I checked on my car, 92 mustang, and was quoted 120 i think
 
Go to a fabric store and ask for upholstery tacks, they have a corkscrew shape instead of the straight thumbtack, and these won't fall out.
 
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