| Once ALL of the tabs are cut you can pretty much take the whole door apart. This is when you will remove the cardboard backing and you will use it as a template. The following is for the type of material you have currently: |
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| “Leather”: If you have leather door panels and you are performing this then you have two options that you can do. |
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| Option 1- DO NOT REMOVE THE MATERIAL FROM THE BOARD! You can thoroughly clean your existing material that you have, and you can just use the whole board as a template to trace out the pattern for the new skin. |
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| - Take your new material and lay it flat on the floor with the backside of it up. |
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| - Now take your template and lay it face down on the materials back. |
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| - With a pen of some sort or marking device trace 3 to 4 inches from the edges around your template. This is to ensure that you have enough room for corners and such. Make sure you also trace where holes should be for things like mounts points, etc. Do not worry about having too much material because in the end you can just trim it off. I would rather have too much than not enough, and start over. |
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| - Once this is done take your template off and with a pair of sharp scissors cut along your trace, but do not cut the markings for the inner holes. |
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| - Once you cut out your new fabric you can choose to make the template for the other door by placing the piece you just cut out right side up on a new section of fabric so that the materials are backside to backside to trace and cut it out. |
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| - With your templates cut and ready to go you need to ensure that the surface of your existing panel is CLEAN. Make sure that you have a heat gun or you or your wife’s hair drier handy to stretch the material around the corners and curves. |
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| - Take your spray adhesive and use it according to its directions. The kind that I used said to spray a coat on the mounting surface of the panel and a coat on the backside of the fabric. Allow a few seconds or minutes for it to get tacky, and then lay the fabric carefully on the surface so that it aligns with your existing panel and in a manner so that you do not get any trapped air bubbles. This can be tricky so make sure that you exercise extreme caution when doing this step. Make sure that as part of it goes down you apply pressure to smooth it on and get the air bubbles out. Take your time and be patient. |
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| - With the material on flip the panel over, and spray another coat along the edges so that when you go to fold the material over it will adhere properly. Once tacky you can begin be folding over the straight edges by applying heat and gently pulling the material over the edge and onto the backside of the panel. You are going to have to utilize your own abilities here when it comes to the corners because you will have to cut a slit in the material for it to conform to the contours of the panel. This is where the heat gun/hair drier really comes in handy because once you slit the material enough you will be able to stretch it to conform to your needs. Again this is tricky and you will need to make the judgment calls for this. |
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| - After you have successfully placed the new material onto your door panel you will need to cut just enough of an X shape in the inner holes of the panel so that the mounting points will be able to stick through. The slits for the mounting tabs also need to be cut so carefully go along the edge of the panel and press down till you find those little slits and then once you find them make a slit with your razor so that the tab posts can be pressed through. Once all your holes have been cut you can now get ready to put your new panel back together. |
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| - This next step can be done differently so please understand that my way is that the only way. Others have used screws to re-attach the panel with success. I have found a way that is not as easy but works none the less. I took a soldering iron with an old tip and those plastic tabs that you where supposed to save and melted them back onto the plastic posts. With the panel on the frame of the plastic I pressed it firmly together and with a piece of plastic and a plastic post I used the soldering iron to melt the two together. After they where melted and still pliable I took (my thumb) an object to firmly press the plastic flat so when it cooled and hardened it was used just as GM did when they put the door together originally. As I said this is not the easiest, but it worked the best for me. |
