Oppai

Hi Folks,
The pink FD I bought a month ago came with a dashboard that had peeling/lifting foam so I figured I'd do a thread on the process of recovering / reupholstering it in foam & vinyl.

Since these cars are up to 28 years old now and age isn't particularly kind to 90's upholstery foam & vinyl, I imagine I won't be the only person needing to go through this process.
I still have no idea if I'll be successful in this endeavor since I have pretty much zero experience with upholstery, but I figured it'd be a good learning experience and better to gamble $150 on materials than paying the $1500 I was quoted for on the dash job.


Search tags: dashboard reupholstery dashboard repair recover recovery rewrap leather vinyl foam

Oppai

Dash removal is fairly straightforward. Make sure you wear eye protection because the 28 year old foam disintegrates into dust and gets in your eyes and lungs.
The dash is held into the body with 9 bolts. There are also 2 bolts holding the steering column to the dash. Make sure you take out all the other center console panels and the shifter assembly.


My car was probably parked outdoors most of its life. The plastic is extremely brittle. Take a look at this quick video of my defroster vents crumbling.
I'm sure most FD's have brittle plastic issues in one way or another. These damned plastic trim pieces cost a fortune since most of them are NLA from mazda.
The problem is compounded for my RHD since parts need to be shipped from Japan.
I've ordered LRB speed aluminum vents to replace this plastic crap. Plan on painting it with a textured black finish similar to the rest of the dash vinyl. I'll report on how it turns out.

I know some cars have foam that's flaking and vinyl that's cracked. In my case, the foam was lifting from the dash and came off in one solid piece. This will be pretty helpful for roughly templating my vinyl later on, as well as shaping the edges.
All I needed was a pry bar and about 10 minutes to get the vinyl and foam off in one piece (sans one particularly well glued piece of foam).
NOTE: DO NOT REST THE DASHBOARD ON THE FLOOR LEATHER SIDE UP.
Make sure you prop up the dashboard by a strong point in the plastic (underneath the speaker) with something or you will break many fragile plastic appendages. I used a short stepstool pictured on the right.

This awful foam is the source of 90% of the headache involved in this process. The fact that the adhesive has completely released and the foam has lifted tells you that the OEM foam has insufficient adhesion to the plastic.
To address this issue and hopefully never have to repeat this process again, I will be sanding down all of the mating surfaces with 140 grit sandpaper to promote adhesion.


My dashboard had a LOT of cracks. I repaired them all with superglue and steel cracker tin strips as you can see here. I used clothes clamps to hold the reinforcement strips against the adhesive. This worked very well and all these cracks are now definitely stronger than the plastic was originally.
Just to be sure, I also plan on applying JB weld generously over some of these reinforced parts. More on this later.

Oppai

Steel dash frame removed. When unscrewing this steel frame, most likely there will be surface rust on every single screw that seizes them in place.
Torquing the screws too hard will cause the plastic housings to crack. Enough cracked screw housings and your dash will be loose, rattly and chinsy when it goes back in, or worse, it won't mount up at all.
WD-40 and mild heat from a butane torch/lighter will help with undoing the seized rusty screws.
In my case, about 5 of the screw housings still ended up cracking. I repaired with super glue, and I will later reinforce with epoxy.
Next steps for this surface rusted steel dash frame is harness removal followed by a wash and a coat of rust converter.

Cleaned off any foam and adhesive residue and then went ahead and sanded down all the mating surfaces on the dash with 140 grit sandpaper to promote adhesion.
The finish on the plastic from the factory is extremely smooth and it makes perfect sense why the upholstery was lifting.
Pretty straightforward. The speaker diaphragm was way past it and I'm honestly not even sure if this speaker still works. Will decide later if I delete, replace, or leave it there.

As for the screws themselves, all of them got a vinegar bath to remove rust, followed by a coat of silver primer. Turned out better than expected and should keep the screws from rusting again.
​​​​​​As added safety, I dipped the tip of every screw in permatex antiseize, not only in case I ever had to remove, but also to lubricate the entry while threading in. It's very easy to also crack the plastic trying to thread the screws back in, especially on the repaired ones.
With the antiseize on every screw, everything went in nice and smooth and is ready for epoxy reinforcement. A couple of the screw heads were moderately stripped during removal so those are no longer pictured. Will have to dig up some replacements.


Now I'm waiting on all the tools and materials to arrive to begin next steps: rust convertor, foam shaping, vinyl cutting, epoxy reinforcement.

marksae

iTrader: (1)

Great job! I'm enjoying all the details you're providing.

I recently removed my dash and dash frame too. I was able to remove all the rust from the frame by just using Rustoleum Rust Dissolver Gel. I didn't have to do any sanding or wire brushing. I just applied the gel, let it sit for 30 - 60 minutes, and wiped it off.

DaleClark

iTrader: (55)

Nice! Going to be interested in how the final product looks!

Fortunately the FD's dash doesn't seem to crack as badly as some other cars - 240's crack like crazy. But this can also be a way to do some custom work to the dash.

Dale

Oppai

That result looks very nice but I'd ideally like to add a coating that can prevent future rusting which is why I was opting for rust converter. I have my doubts that it works exactly as advertised.
Will have to give a second thought to rust removal with that gel you mentioned followed by primer or paint. Guess I'll do a small test piece with the rust converter first and see how it fares.

Oppai

The faux leather doesn't seem to crack but the plastics make up for that in spades..... did you see the video clip of my defroster vents?!
Hoping 3d printing tech can catch up soon so that these plastic FD dashes don't become impossible to source.
All the NLA from mazda trim pieces are already becoming ridiculously overinflated in price.

marksae

iTrader: (1)

I was skeptical about this product before using it. I believe it mainly works on lightly rusted parts, where the rust hasn't penetrated very deep.

I thought I was going to have to get my frame bead blasted to get all the rust removed and then painted. Just from a labor standpoint, this product saved me a ton of time. The product claims to provide a year of rust prevention after use, so we'll see. I don't live in a very humid environment, so I'm going to just leave mine as-is and revisit it if the rust come back.

Nakd n Fearless

iTrader: (4)

Every Nissan S13 has a cracked dash
I remember mine being mint cherry and the next day a 2 foot crack appeared!
I imagine a clean one is worth its weight in gold by now
probably my favorite dash in the 90's, the 93 FD being a close second.

Spirit-RE

iTrader: (25)

Good work. Excited to see how this turns out. This stuff is always in the back of my mind, what do I do when interior parts need refurbished after the supply dries up. Hope to see more projects like this that have good results, and not needing to rely on increasingly scarce parts that are over 2 decades old.


My fear is what will our interior plastics look like in another 20 years?

Oppai

Removed the wiring harness and sprayed the steel frame in rust converter.
First brushed off loose surface rust with a steel wire brush, then coated in degreaser and rinsed off with a mild pressure water jet.
Used the entire can of rust converter and applied several coats to the surface rusted frame.

Here's the before and after...the finish is fairly blotchy and I get the feeling that the product was unable to achieve full penetration to convert all of the rust.
These are pretty much the results I was expecting, but I wanted to give it a try.

You can see the blotchiness clearer in these photos, I am absolutely sure I had full coverage. The reason for this blotchiness is most likely due to the depth of the rust in these contoured areas where it was more difficult to steel brush.

On these smaller parts you can see that the black oxide finish isn't very thick from the area where the finish came off and stuck to the paper. I estimate the penetration of the solvent to be maybe 100-200µ at most.
Considering I had to use the whole can and still couldn't achieve an even black finish, rust remover jelly seems like a much better bargain for your money.
Even after including the cost of a separate can of primer or paint, it's still cheaper than this product which I paid $15 for. This also doesn't save you manual labor because of the need to brush off loose rust powder.

Now I have to give serious thought to going back and fully stripping all of the oxide off of this frame. I fancy the idea of painting it pink to match the car, but I'm also not sure if the rust remover will be effective at removing this blackened oxide finish that's on there now.

In Short: DO NOT BUY!

marksae

iTrader: (1)

Bummer on the disappointing results with the rust converter. I wonder if the rust dissolver would even work on it now that the surface finish has been altered. Might be worth a shot.

Oppai

The faux leather material arrived today. Started shaping the leather, especially the pressed edges because it'll be much harder to do later on.
This is the material I'm working with. The texture match is extremely close to OEM, but not an exact match. Close enough for me though. The color is pretty much identical.
I should note everything done in these photos is on top of the original dash foam/vinyl.


I started by making rough cuts to get the general profile of the dash. Nothing special here.

Next up was shaping the most important edge on the dash, the curved edge along the HVAC control panel.
During my work I found out that the OEM vinyl is a thin vinyl wrap material that's about .5mm thick. Such thin vinyl is good for heat-pressing, stretching, and tensioning. Much like exterior vinyl wrap.
The vinyl leather I'm working with is about 3mm thick, has a cotton backing for better adhesion, and does not stretch much. It does not respond very well to heat, does not have much shape memory as it's prone to burning/melting if over heated. (Much more so than real leather)
This presents a few challenges that I'll have to work through during this endeavor, but doesn't make it an impossible job.

1. very hard corners will need to creased and tucked neatly rather than stretching over corners the way the OEM dash material was done (see photos)
2. I have to be very careful with the heat gun or risk wasting the entire sheet of leather
3. in the glove compartment area, there simply isn't enough material without causing extreme tension and creasing due to overstretching. Fortunately, the uncovered area is hidden behind the glove box so this isn't a major concern.
4. this material is prone to marring so using brute or harsh materials to shape it will quickly ruin the finish
5. in order to improve the pliability of the material, I cut the AC vent and speaker holes first. |
6. to avoid leaving imprints in the leather I had to use scrap pieces to cushion the binder clips I'm using to shape the material. This works nicely.

Cutting the holes in the material before stretching and gluing is counter-intuitive since stretching may cause them to shift, but the material simply doesn't have enough give without those holes for stretching into the glove box area.
I left 1cm of extra material for margin of error on these two holes. I also hope to mostly use this central area of the dash as a reference point to start the stretching from.
The area of the dash that requires the most attention in this regard is the passenger glove compartment and air vent/air bag area.

Here you can see an example of a corner that's too harsh to try to stretch the material over. Since this corner will be hidden behind the door panel anyway, I opted to fold and tuck it neatly instead of trying to force the issue.
Since these corners have to line up flush with the door panels, getting the right shape for the corners would be near impossible without wrapping over the original dash material.. to the point where I'm considering reusing the old hardened foam instead of trying to replicate those weirdly shaped parts of the dash out of new foam.
If my experiments in shaping firm upholstery foam end up in failure I may have to do that.

Foam arrives this weekend, and spray adhesive mid-week. WIll continue posting updates on my progress. If anyone here does upholstery for a living I would really appreciate any tips or critique.

Oppai

Foam arrived and attempting to sculpt the corner pieces has ended in failure. The challenges that I thought I'd be encountering during this project ended up panning out exactly as I had imagined.
I bought 44 lb high density upholstery foam. Pretty much the most rigid stuff you can get that's considered upholstery foam.
This foam still turned out to be too soft to hold sharp edges, in addition to being pretty difficult to sculpt accurately.
I'm aware of hot-wire cutting techniques that RC aircraft hobbyists use, but $150 for a decent hot wire cutter was too steep for me for this project.
Pretty sure polyurethane foam also melts, burns, and produces fumes if you try to cut it with a hot wire, but not 100% certain.

This is the profile that the foam ended up with. Clearly not very clean since it's a soft foam which doesn't lend itself to cutting nice clean lines.
If not for the fact that it can't hold a sharp edge, the new foam would actually be passable otherwis as the imperfections can't be seen once the leather has been wrapped over it.

In this side-by-side you can very clearly see why the lack of a hard edge was not an acceptable result for my purposes.
For those who wouldn't mind this result, I hope this proves useful as a resource for their adventures in dash recovering.
For me, I've decided to re-use the old foam and wrap new vinyl over it on the two corners of the dash where the hard shaped edges are prominent and need to line up flush with the door panels.
Everything else will be covered with new foam.

As for what could potentially work for those who can't stand the idea of having old crap still in their dash after a complete overhaul, I suggest trying polyurethane sculpting foam which is rigid.

The problem with sculpting foam is how precisely your negative cavity underneath the foam will have to fit the dash's plastic moulding. A completely flush fit will be necessary for good adhesion.
The process for carving those would be hours of painstaking work. I'd rather not wait for new foam to arrive and also put a full day's work into shaping it, so I'll just compromise on my personal build and throw the old corners back on.
Since the leather I'm wrapping over the old pieces is 3mm thick, I will be sanding down the bottom side of the foam slightly to accomodate for this addition to the thickness, as well as roughening up the foam surface to promote adhesion.

Oppai

As an aside, I think the foam used by mazda during manufacture of these vehicles is most likely a polyurethane foam variant that's die-cut and then heat pressed in a mould.
The heat and pressure in the mould most likely hardens the foam used on this dash into the appropriate shape. the smooth glossy finish of the foam on the adhesive surface that mates with the plastic dash seems to indicate some sort of heat-pressing.

Oppai

still waiting on some sew foam for the rest of the dash so decided to do some spray painting.
These red door sills were hideously mismatched with the car and needed addressing...

I decided to go for a textured black finish paint - rustoleum textured black. See the results --

Excellent finish. Looks almost OEM! Turns out somebody replaced the sills with aluminum ones.. but no idea why they were red. Stood out like a sore thumb.

But just as I was about to start singing praises for rustoleum... in typical rustoleum fashion, the can clogged up from the inside still 90% full.
I was only 1 coat away from finishing this job too.. Infuriating!!

Oppai

I've pretty much finished the job now but I'll split the remainng work into two posts.
First is the foam:
made a couple of small mistakes but the foam pretty much went alright. Cutting the foam was a pretty straightforward process.

For precise cuts I would dot the foam by feeling the edge of the plastics through the foam and then holding my finger there for the marker dots. Cutting is just connecting the dots. You can get very accurate cuts like this.
The foam is quite easy to cut before it's glued on so I suggest doing the precise cuts before gluing. All of the cuts I did after gluing were miserable. The tacky glue gets onto the blade and hangs on the foam as well as making the blade dull more quickly.

Making the cuts in this glove compartment area ******* sucks and is hard to get exactly right. I ended up having to patch this area up.

Made the mistake of trying to lift the vinyl off the original foam for a portion of the corner piece. The ancient oem foam alone isn't thick enough to line up at all with the new foam (1/2 inch) It also doesn't stick well and has an awful surface texture.

Quickly realized this was a mistake but not before having already cut that portion out of the new foam sheet. Ended up having to make a patch which turned out looking alright.

In place of the recessed passenger dash area outline, I went for a proud foam pillow in that area in the same shape. I would later end up deeply regretting this decision although it doesn't look that horrible yet

That's it for the foam.The foam job took about 3 hours. Could be done in an evening assuming all the prep work on the dash has already been done.
Was happy enough with the result after the foam was done... see my next post for the vinyl leather which was a different story.

Oppai

Laying the vinyl leather took about 9 hours total across three evenings. I'll be honest about it now: it was an absolute ******* nightmare.
A lot of the mistakes were my fault and were good lessons learned for my first time doing this kind of job.
Some of the mistakes were my fault but I learned absolutely nothing from them because they had nothing to do with laying the vinyl.
Here goes nothing...

Initially it went great. Cut my holes, cut the general shape out, glued a majority of the dash down starting from the vent and speaker holes to prevent warping in those areas which I had cut first.
There was a dimple in the plastic about 1/2 an inch deep that caused an ugly recess at the front of the speaker grill since the foam conformed to the shape of the dimple. I added a foam cushion on top after realizing there was a dimple there.
The filler pillow looks pretty awful with the vinyl over it as you can see in the photo.
If I did it over again, the pillow or some great stuff spray would go underneath the foam inside that dimple.

Fortunately, the edge around the HVAC panel looked decent enough. This is pretty much the main dash edge you have to look at on the regular.

Things were going smooth until the nightmare began... I had broken my AC vent panel into a million pieces during removal and prep of the dash.That pissed me off pretty good. Took me a few days to find another used one that I had to ship here from England.
What I wasn't expecting was to drop the new (used) vent panel I paid $130 for and also break that into five pieces .
This was such a hit to my morale I wanted to ******* quit for the day but I chugged on...It took over an hour to JB weld the sucker back together cause I sure as hell wasn't about to pay another $130 fora third brittle piece of **** to break on me again.
As if this wasn't enough, I would later also shatter the passenger side vent and have to epoxy that back together as well.
Later I'll probably end up having to replace both with the 3d printed fixed louvre replacements from DRAKES..
For now I live with the shame of knowing I broke them ALL and wasted a buck thirty.
This is the kind of **** that makes grown men cry.

The nightmare continues... This part of the dash where the damn thing curves into the next dimension was beyond difficult to stretch, tension, glue, and hold down against the foam.
The result ended up awful. The dumb pillow thing didn't help at all and made it look even worse.
In hindsight this is probably where I SHOULD'VE started gluing the leather down instead of the vents.
Also, I should have glued much smaller patches at a time. Since I was able to blaze through most of the top deck of the dash which was flat, I continued on the pace of roughly 1 square foot sections. BIG mistake.
For anyone attempting this themselves, I recommend gluing in triangular sections instead of rectangular. (much easier to keep tension on a 3 sided shape than a 4 sided one)
I also recommend not gluing down more than 1/2 of a sq ft at a time. Unless it's a totally flat surface like the top of the dash, you should be working in about 6x6x8 inch triangles. I didn't do this and I had poor adhesion in some of the critical spots.
It looks pretty shoddy but at this point I figured I could live with it if this was the only wrinkly crappy area on the dash. (Spoiler: it wasn't)

Remember how I said the foam was a bitch to cut properly in the glove compartment area? Well the vinyl is about 10x worse.
There just straight up isn't enough material and it requires a significant amount of stretching which my vinyl wasn't very good at.
The tension in the vinyl in this area was so severe that the foam lifted off the plastic in this corner. Absolute nightmare.
Much like the foam patch in this corner, I had to add a leather patch which I hoped would be covered by the glove box. I was off by about 1cm because the vinyl wasn't as compliant as the foam. Great

Here comes the true nightmare of this entire project. Prepare your eyes.
The pictures speaks for themselves.....


as if that wasn't bad enough, the foam patch I had laid down along the top passenger side of the dash showed a clear seam through the vinyl.
The seam didn't show until the adhesive had dried and shrunk/cured. Probably because I hadn't kept tension on the vinyl for the entire shrinkage period of the adhesive. Horrific..

This part also turned out horrific. There was just no way I could get the leather to make a full 180 degree bend into that corner without folding, stretching, or creasing further up. I had to make a relief cut which ended up producing this awful seam.
Most of this was due to the fact that I cut too much material off too early. I now know that I shouldn't make any cuts until I start laying down the leather first to get an actual idea of how it'll crease, stretch, and fold rather than doing guesswork.
Since the materials in these areas have to bend and warp so dramatically, even the 6+ inches I left on wasn't enough material. Lesson learned.

All in all, it was a good learning experience. I learned a lot about this skill and I have no doubt I could go back and redo this and reduce/remove about 50-70% of these mistakes.
For now, my delusions of grandeur have been shattered. I"m sure many can relate to this feeling with their own projects.
Now the question is if this becomes the next owners problem or if I end up keeping this car long enough to where it'll start grating on my conscience enough to attempt this a second time.
Now that I have the tools, the material cost to me would be about $60 to try again.

Man, even from far away it looks like a turd. What a crap job I did. Consider my ego sufficiently bruised.
But with these lessons learned in this post, I'm sure if someone slightly more meticulous than I could manage a decent job.

With that said, if quality is a priority over learning then just save yourself the time and send it to the upholsterers.
I think it's about a 10 hour job even for the pros so anything under 1.2k is pretty reasonable I believe. Materials cost should be somewhere in the ballpark of $80-$200.

You'll probably still have to invest about a dozen hours into plastics repairs and prep work anyway.
I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies the responsibility of uninstalling, repairing, and installing these 90's mazda plastics. Absolutely heartbreaking..
WIth every shitty plastic panel that crumbles between my fingers and rapes my wallet, it pushes me inches closer to caging the car and stripping the interior.

Oppai

On the bright side, these aluminum defroster vents I got from LRB speed are excellent in quality. With a coat of rustoleum textured black they work great!
I will be painting them once the paint arrives in the mail. Highly recommended upgrade. Install and uninstall is a breeze with no risk of damage to the part unlike the OEM plastic vents. Vents will not get brittle with time unlike oem vents.

YellowT2

iTrader: (1)

Thanks for posting your adventure; good warning and lessons learned for any of us thinking about tackling similar projects.

It looks like a lot of your issues were around the "pillow" you made; just making that area flatter would probably have helped a lot. Honestly if that area was flatter I could live with the other small issues. I guess the good news is that it's on the passenger side, so you can avoid looking at it!

Oppai

Yup I think so too. Unfortunately the plastics in this area are recessed which will cause soft seams which is why I wanted to preserve that shape instead of having odd looking seams. The pillow was definitely a bad idea.
The better way to go about it for anyone else trying this in the future is to try to get a really tight seal between the foam and the plastic as well as good downwards tension on the vinyl while sticking it to the foam.

DaleClark

iTrader: (55)

I learned some time back that mechanical skill and upholstery skill are 2 different things. I have mechanical skill, I do NOT have upholstery skill.

That said with all the compound curves on the dash this can be a tough job period. Good thing is you can peel it off and try again.

Dale

Oppai

REDEMPTION!
I also redid my transmission tunnel trim since it had a small tear in it. This piece went much better than the dash. It's not perfect by any means but a vast improvement.
This piece is more technically difficult to wrap than the dashboard was, so I really wish I would have done this piece first...
This piece uses much less material and also is much easier to undo a shitty job. (I wasted two sheets of leather trying)
I don't have the willpower left in me to redo the dash right now so it'll just go back in until I can't bear the shame anymore.
There's a few stretch marks and wrinkles due to the curves of the piece but overall a vast improvement having learned from my mistakes on the dash.

Oppai

Final results

Oppai

wasn't expecting to make this post but..
after letting the car bake in the sun for a couple of days hoping the vinyl leather would soften up and smooth itself out -- it did exactly that, but not for the reasons I intended.
the 3m headliner spray glue I used for this project melted in the sun after only 2 days and is no longer holding the vinyl down to the foam...
DO NOT use this product for upholstery purposes I guess... It WILL NOT hold up to sunlight.
Guess I will eventually have no choice but to redo this-- both a blessing and a curse. But at least in the meantime my dash doesn't look as bad as it did when I had just finished the job.

As a side note I let the glue cure for about 3 days after applying the vinyl, so I don't think this is a case of user error. The instructions on the label say it should be fully cured after 1 hour. Everything was glued down tight as a drum within a few hours after applying the adhesive.