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This section of my page is about the door trim modification that I did due to my dogs attempting to get out of the truck and protect it from the people going by. Needless to say, they got all 4 doors well beyond what you can repair the vinyl. I was faced with either spending $250 (that's per door, not grand total) or finding some other reasonable way to get the door replaced/repaired. Well, through much searching of junkyards (let me tell you, there aren't too many Expy's out in the yards) and talking to appolsterers, I was between a rock and a hard place and the rock was rolling down hill onto me.

I took a leap of faith and plunged in head first into my own fix. THis is what I did and how it come out.

First thing I did was to remove the doors from the truck and take a razor blade and cut the general shape of what I wanted my fabric replacement to look like. At this point I figured I had nothing to loose since I would end up replacing the door panels anyways. Just a little word of caution, you don't need to press hard once you are through the vinyl. I made a simple S-curve to follow the curve of the door that was already there. I followed the indentation that was in the door until it turned up to the door lock, I then just straightened out the line and ran it forward.

From here I just peeled a corner of the vinyl up and kept pulling. The vinyl actually peels off really easy and doesn't affect the foam underneath. I ended up sanding part of the foam away to remove the damage done by the dogs. I did this by just taking some fine sandpaper and my power sander. The foam is going to look somewhat rough, but, the fabric will smooth it out, so don't worry.


You will notice that my door lock knobs have been removed. I did this on purpose as I find that they don't really serve a purpose with having power door locks, auto-lock when the truck is put in gear, and having the keyfob which can unlock the doors. I mearly bought some expanding foam(neat stuff to play with!!) and filled the front door knob recesses in, and then sanded the foam to the contour of the door. The rear doors don't need to be filled as the fabric will cover the small opening. You may opt to do this, or you may not. You will find that by leaving the lock knobs in the doors, the front door panels will be more difficult to cover. The only down side to this is the rear doors will not be able to be unlocked unless the driver/front passenger unlock the doors. I'm going to be fixing this by making the rear doors auto-unlock like the front doors do.

From here I cut my fabric to be slightly larger than the area that I was covering (I left about 3" extra all the way around). From here I placed the fabric show side down and found the edge that I had cut earlier and started stapling the fabric into place. WARNING!!!:This step is very critical to a good job, if the staples are not put in a straight line, it will show later on. TRUST ME!!!!! From there I trimmed the fabric so only about a half inch of fabric would be left on the underside once the material is folded back over. I would recommend the use of a pneumatic stapler as they will allow for a better application of the staples, but, be careful not to get to powerful of a pneumatic stapler as to push the staples through the door panel. I just pushed the staples that didn't make it all the way thorugh with the flat bladed screw driver.


From here I applied a generous amount of spray adhesive glue (spray can) to both the foam door panel and the fabric, let it set for the recommended 30 seconds and then pressed the two together. You must be careful at this stage, since once the fabric touches the glued foam, it is going to want to stick and not come apart. You can still peel it apart, but, you don't have a lot of time. Don't worry for the moment about the raised fabric. Worry more about getting the fabric layed flat. From here, stretch the fabric and push it into the valleys of the door. Keep working with it as it may want to keep coming unglued(hint, if you can look ahead a little bit, you can leave a little extra fabric in those areas, but, don't leave too much as this may cause a wrinkle). You may want to even spray part of the fabric and door, lay that much, and then do more of the door.

This project takes about 2 hours per door between disassembling the door, removing the door lock mechanism that drives the knob, covering the door, and the installation. Plan on having the front doors apart for 8 hours(per panel-but you can do both at the same time for just 8 hours total) since you need to let the foam cure nice and hard before you start sanding. But, you don't need to be right there with the door, so, it amounts to 2 hours worth of work.


In the way of tools, all I used was:
Door removal/install: regular screwdriver(control panel), phillips screw driver(door panel), and a nutdriver(door handle)

Covering: fabric sheers/scissors, clamp(hold fabric on corners so the glue could set up), stapler(w/ 3/8" staples), razor blade, and regular screw driver to remove the plastic trim peice for door knob

Foam application/contouring: Expanding foam, knife (rough contouring), and power sander

Door lock modification: flush cut pliers, needlenose pliers, torx bit (may/may not be required since you may be able to remove the lock button bar without removing the latch mechanism, granted, much easier to do if the latch mechanism is loose), and drill/0.25" bit (rear doors only-removal of pivot point on front edge of door)

vinyl removal: razor blade and regular screw driver(remove lock button guide).

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