Thegutted4

so in my 87 4runner that I am currently restoring the headliner was completely shot. It had rips and tears and was molding, I completely took out the headliner and Im wondering if anybody has any ideas of a cheap way to make your own headliner.

scope103

For my '85 Chevy pickup, the headliner is a formed piece of very heavy cardboard, covered with a foam-fabric laminate. The foam disintegrated, letting the fabric hang loosely. The cardboard was in good shape.

Step one: don't try to re-glue it. It won't work; you're gluing good cardboard to near-fictitious foam. The foam will just keep getting worse and let go.

Step two: go the fabric store, and try to find the material that covers "felt boards." It's a naturally spongy (and pretty stretchy) woven fabric (I got it in black; take what you can get, you won't get a perfect match to your interior). Get spray adhesive designed for this application, something like http://www.autozone.com/autozone/acc...er=130215_0_0_ Don't use general purpose spray adhesive (like you use to mount photos); the stuff you want sprays on fairly goopy, like snot.

Lay the cardboard on the fabric and cut carefully. Lay the cardboard out on lots of newspaper (the glue overspray would otherwise be hilarious!), spray on the glue, then have someone help you carefully lay the fabric on and press it into the shape. When set, flip it over and carefully glue down the excess fabric.

You can get real fabric-foam laminate, but all I could find was very expensive. I probably lost about 1 db of sound damping, but it looked great!