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Refinishing Your Interior Part I: Removing and cleaning your headliner.

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I recently redid my headliner and sun visors, and I found that my car had an aftermarket sunroof put in, so I figured I’d make a detailed write up to help anyone that might have an OEM sunroof or an aftermarket sunroof.

Tools Required:
-Screwdrivers (Flathead and Phillips of varying sizes.)
-Box cutter or Razor Knife
-Wire Brush
-Binder Clips (Bought a 30 pack of Med. Sized clips for $5 at Office Depot)
-Scissors or Pinking Shears
-Marker of some sort (Preferably one you can see on your material, but dark enough to be hidden if necessary)
-Torx bits (My application required it, yours may not.)

Materials Required:
-3M Adhesive Spray (Found at any craft or automotive store)
-Material of choice (I picked up two yards of charcoal felt material for $4.99 at JoAnn‘s. Also, this material is thick but had enough give to wrap around complex curves.)

Part I: Removing and Cleaning the Headliner

Here are a couple of shots of my sun roof. Doesn’t quite look like a stock one does it?
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First things first. Remove your headliner. It’s pretty straight forward; remove the interior panels that are necessary to get to any bolts or fasteners. Once it’s out, it might look like this.
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Now, I didn’t have any idea my sunroof was aftermarket, but I started to figure it out when I had to cut my headliner from the sunroof frame. Another clue was the extra layer of material present OVER my stock headliner material.
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Another clue was the hasty and very uneven cuts in the original headliner.
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This frame was bolted to the sunroof, but the headliner material COVERED the bolt holes. I’m assuming they dropped the whole unit in from over the car. I had to use my Torx bits to get these bolts out.
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Back to the headliner. Peel off the existing material from the headliner board. This should be relatively easy, as the foam has long since deteriorated.
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Once the material is removed, you’ll have a foamy substance left on the board which you’ll need to remove with the wire brush. If you don’t have one, I would suggest getting one, because I used everything from a toothbrush to a putty knife, but I ended up buying a tire brush that worked much more efficiently.
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Here is the headliner board halfway cleaned off.
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All done!
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After cleaning the board, I vacuumed it to remove any leftover dust. If I’m going through all of the trouble to remove this thing and reline it, I’m making sure I NEVER have to do it again.

Now throw away the source of all of your pains.
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