recovering the vinyl part of the door panels

philkmil

I searched the forums and found a fair amount of info on re-covering headliners and also the fabric part of the door panels, but nothing about re-covering the vinyl part. I imagine that it would be difficult to do because of the contours. Has anybody had any success with this?
My door panels all have several large gouges in them and I was wondering if anybody has any suggestions and what I could to do to make it look "prettier." I tried one of those vinyl repair kits, and that turned out to make things worse in my opinion. Has anybody tried anything creative like peeling off the vinyl and painting the bare door panel? Or perhaps re-covering it with a different type of material? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

PorterWagonneer

Seems that the vinyl on the honda door panels is prone to deterioration; has happened on my (former) hatch, (former) sedan & my son's crx. He had his redone at a little furniture repair place. It was years ago so if I remember correctly...
The guy separated the upper & lower panel pieces. Probably either drilled out or used a solder iron to melt the plastic rivets that are used to join the two parts together. Removed the old vinyl & draped/placed new vinyl on the panel & then just stapled new vinyl to the backside flanges of the panel. He probably used some contact cement around the door handle opening.
Turned out ok.
When I saw the end result I thought, hmmm. I guess I could have done that but it was my son's car so .... get off the game console and work on your car! You can buy fabric at a local fabric store or online from places like jc whitney.... I would not be afraid to try that now. What is the worst that could happen? You see this done on the tv shows all the time. Learn by doing?

philkmil

thanks for the info. I think I might try to find a panel from a sedan in a wrecking yard and practice on that because brown wagon panels seem pretty hard to come by. Do you know if the shop used some sort of stretchy vinyl? I think I may try adding heat to get it to fit to the contours, but I have a feeling with regular vinyl I'm going to get wrinkles. Its worth a shot though. So did the final product look somewhat close to stock, or did it look kind of tacky? You don't happen to have pictures do you?

PorterWagonneer

Unfortunately I did not take any pictures & my son has since sold the car. The vinyl was not a perfect match but very close colorwise and pattern. It did not exactly match the shade but then the repaired panels were new and the rest of the car was original. It wasn't wrinkled or puckered at the corners.
Had not considered the use of a heat gun but sounds reasonable.

wag-oh-vandrew

You all may laugh but I has the same thing as far as gouges and ripps, I washed, sanded, primed and painted mine using some all purpose filler where the flaws were, it's been about 3 weeks now and I've armoralled them and they look brand new.

Glifious

^ Pictures? Sounds interesting.