Regular readers may recall that I recently bought a ’74 Firebird Esprit from that most dangerous of online rabbit holes, eBay. It’s the second car I’ve bought sight unseen, the second car from eBay. Luckily for me, the seller of the Firebird was fairly accurate in his description of the car, but he did leave one thing out. The saggy headliner. It’s tough not to notice, but not as hard as one would expect to change. I spent three and a half hours doing it.
To extract the headliner from the cocoon that is a second-generation Firebird, one must remove the visors, dome light, windshield trim, side window trim (which is largely held in by plastic clips), backlite trim, and seatbelt retractor covers. I loosened the roached sail panel trim pieces, but did not remove them. It is best to maneuver the headliner board from the passenger side of the car, because the steering wheel is like a great big headliner roadblock.
The headliner board will drop an unreal amount of foam into your hair, onto your clothes, and in the car. It’s awful. Once it’s out of the car, however, it’s time for scraping, sanding, brushing, or whatever to remove the old foam and as much of the old glue as is possible. Have a vacuum cleaner handy and try to avoid doing this job on a windy day. Unfortunately for me, I did not heed that advice.
This picture shows why chemical strippers and cleaners are bad ideas–they could seep into the board and cause problems later. I removed as much old glue as I could without damaging the board. It’s important to have a clean, dry substrate for the glue to adhere to.
Tearing apart a car always makes for detective fun. This board is almost certainly original to the car, as it was made just over a month prior to the car’s assembly.
This will be a good time to apologize for my fuzzy basement pictures; my camera is a cheap Fuji and it doesn’t take the best pictures in low light situations, and I have better things to do than to worry about it. I bought my headliner material from National Parts Depot in Canton, MI, and it came in a large roll with plenty of material for later trimming. It cost 94 dollars shipped (and with sales tax, because NPD has a warehouse in Michigan). I unrolled it and lay it on the headliner board, centering it all the way around.
A helpful fellow Firebird owner on a Pontiac forum suggested using 3M “Super 77” spray adhesive, which I did. I sprayed the material and board a little at a time, starting in the front. After waiting 30 seconds for the glue to become tacky, I smoothed out the headliner and moved on to the next part. This was probably the easiest part of the whole job. This picture shows the section of glue that is just becoming tacky.
When the material was all glued down, I used scissors and a carpet knife to trim the edges, dome light hole, and visor holes. The adhesive is ready to go when you are; there’s no need to let it cure before moving on. The smell of the glue, however, is fairly overpowering in an enclosed area. My house smelled like glue for the rest of the day. Do this job outside if you can.
At this point, installation is the reverse of removal. I called my dad down to help hold it up while I attached everything, but it is mostly a one-man job. I went out to the garage at around 9:30 am and was done by 1:00, and that included vacuuming most of the foam from the interior. Now, the interior just needs a good cleaning (it did anyway) and some trim paint. A new headliner, especially for under 100 dollars, has to be one of the better investments one can make in a GM car of this vintage. The car looks a thousand times better, and compared to completely replacing all brake hydraulics (which I also had to do), a headliner is a snap.
It occurs to me that the seller didn’t mention the sagging headliner because he thought it was a standard “feature” of mid ’70s GM cars! I mean it WAS, right? LOL. Anyway, nice job and an encouragement to those about to correct this “feature”!
I didn’t bother on my Cadillac Eldorado Diesel, a crap car that I “inherited,” because so much was going bad on it, anyway. So I got out my trusty staple gun instead. When the paint is flaking off, the vinyl roof is shrinking from under the mouldings on its periphery, and the engine is going through $25 fuel filters with every oil change, that seemed to be the best choice until the car got traded on a Taurus wagon. But if the Eldorado had been a gasoline one, and if the paint and vinyl roof had held up, like on a normal car, I would have done as you did.
Staple gun…that’s EXACTLY what I did to the headliner in my former Chevrolet Celebrity!
The board being one month older than the car exemplifies Mass Production inventory control (making & storing large batches of parts), as opposed to Lean Manufacturing (e.g. Toyota) in which the board’s build date would be much closer to final assembly.
Depends. If that date was put there by an OUTSIDE SUPPLIER and not the factory, and the headliner was delivered to Assembly in a Just In Time manner…
“Just In Time” includes both fabrication & delivery; ideally, suppliers build parts only when they get an empty container back from final assembly, eliminating wasted space & time lag. Consequently, it permits earlier detection of defects.
Anyway, the above car was built long before GM or anyone else in America had a clue. Ford was the first to catch on, probably due to their Mazda connection, who themselves adopted it after their near-death in the ’70s.
A quick word of caution. Be very careful with flammable solvents and adhesives in basements and other areas where furnace and water heater pilot lights and electronic igniters are present. Accidents have happened. Better safe than sorry.
I would say don’t use vaporous solvents in an enclosed space like a basement anyway, but I realize not everyone has access to a large, well-ventilated workshop.
But wouldn’t we all like one! Normally, I’d have just done it in the driveway, but it was below 40 degrees outside.
Our family ’78 Buick Century wagon started raining ‘dandruff’ My solution was a neat diagonal rows of staples, in nice 6 inch segments The result was a nice tufted ceiling befitting a mid 70’s bordello red interior. Just place the stapler flat against the headliner, the staple will attach itself to the board.
An excellent idea. bet it looks great. How exactly is it that you are familiar with bordellos?
I tried that on my Malibu. It worked for a little while, but the staples started falling out eventually!
Can I reuse the old headliner? Just glue it back on?
Nice job. Looks great!
Great work! This is one of those relatively inexpensive fixes that makes an old car feel much better to dive.
Did the board absorb a good deal of the glue? Sometimes materials like that require additional applications.
The 3M glue is pretty thick stuff really, and I didn’t notice that it seeped in to any great extent, at least while I was working. I guess I’ll know if the headliner falls again this summer. 🙂
Great job! Makes the interior look almost new again.
I have a woodworking/upholstery shop where I make custom rocking chairs full-time. Whenever I am spraying with chemicals such as foam adhesive or Scotchguard, I make sure the electric construction heater is turned off until the spraying is done.
Very nice! You have demonstrated the *correct* way to do this. On my 86 Fox body Marquis wagon, I did it the cheap way, which involved spray adhesive to stick the existing cloth back onto the board. Mine came out very nicely, but getting the foam-free cloth back down without wrinkles was a bit of a challenge.
The advice you got to use the good stuff by 3M was valuable advice. I did my repair first with cheap generic spray contact adhesive. Within a couple of weeks, it was letting go, as interior heat buildup in summer was too much for it. I did the job a second time with the good (read as “expensive”) stuff and the headliner looked quite good for the rest of the time I owned the car. The bonus was that I was so much faster at it the second time. 🙂
Nice job, I did the interior in my VW last year and 3m 08090 Super Trim Adhesive is my new friend, it’s a bit hard to find but even better than Super 77.
It’s even stinkier too, it you can imagine. I worked outdoors but had to vacate the area while the glue was drying.
When I did the saggy headliner in my 1980 Concord I just took it out and painted it with house paint to keep the junk from sifting down on me.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-1980-amc-concord-little-green-concord-you-dont-know-what-i-got/
Great job on that liner.
I had to do one on my 1985 Cutlass Supreme and it got to be a pain in the back end.
As for the seller not letting you know about the saggy liner. Since 99% of all GM cars from 1970-2000 suffered from Saggy Liner Syndrome( SLS) he probably assumed that you had already assumed that the liner in the Firebird was sagging?
Good job. Wrong fabric though, 2nd gen Firebirds used perforated vinyl on the cardboard headliner. I guess it had already been replaced.
It’s funny that there are two different types available. The NPD catalog online said this was for red ’74 Firebirds, and it already had a cloth headliner (or what was left of it), so I just went with it. It doesn’t matter much to me anyway, but if I had the opportunity, I would have rather gone with the factory issue. Oh well.
Thinking back, my mother’s 74 Luxury LeMans with dark red interior used the old style perforated vinyl headliner with the bows. But it was also not that shade of bright red inside. I always wondered how and on what models they changed over to the fiberboard with the foam-backed fabric glued onto it. I know that it was pretty universal by the time the 1977 B body came out.
There seem to be myriad options for 2nd generation Firebird/Camaro headliners, and some of them are “conversion kits” to install perforated vinyl with bows. This car certainly never came with bows, and according to “SuperDuty455,” you could get the vinyl with fiberboard, too.
I’m certainly not an originality expert on these things, so I’d have to defer to those fastidious Firebird folks. In the meantime, I put 40 or 50 miles on it this weekend, and I had a blast! 🙂 I bought new tires, and I need to tweak the alignment a touch and install a new set of plugs, but it cruises on the freeway very nicely, handles pretty well, stops pretty well…I’m hooked!
Nice job! I was surprised to see the fabric and foam top in a ’74 Firebird. But, I’m no F body expert.
I usually associated the fabric and foam with GM’s downsizing. As far as I know, the first B / C cars to get it were the ’77, the first A’s in 78, the Xs for 1980. I’m not very familiar with the E-bodies from the ’70s.
I notice your visors seem to be vinyl and are in good shape. The ’78 Caprice that spanned three generations in our family used the fabric / foam roof material on the sun visors, and they eventually became sort of puffy and misshapen, but they were never really a problem. Our headliner, amazingly, held up for the 16 years the car was around. Just a few puffy spots, but never a catastrophic failure.
Among your cars, I may be most envious of your Firebird. Everything in my fleet is big and plodding, your Firebird the complete opposite.
Great to see stuff like this here on CC!
Looks good and makes a world of difference for such a small component as a headliner.
Had the same thing happen to me on my 83 Cutlass Supreme. Borrowed my dad’s office stapler and spent an half hour stapling the head liner in place. When I sold the car, the new owner made no mention of the “tuffed” headliner!!!????
Sounds kind of like what I ended up doing with the headliner in my 85 Estate Wagon, except I used the screw-in retainers that Dorman makes. Stuck about 68 of them into foam blocks and painted matching tan with vinyl interior spray paint, then mounted to look like bolsters. Viola!
Very interesting — thanks for posting this. Headliner replacement is one of those repairs that I’ve always wondered how challenging it is.
And I’m impressed that it only took you 3 hours to do this; I think it would have taken me 3 weeks, and still not looked as good in the end.
Amen to that!
Great job!
It really isn’t as hard as it looks/ sounds. In the 1990s some of the fabric stores here carried headliner material. I did a couple of our cars, including my ’89 Betetta and my wife’s ’86 Celebrity wagon.
Used the good 3M adhesive, too. A “bonus” is that you get that “new car smell” back for a couple of weeks afterward. 😉
I have a Gen3 Camaro with T-tops. My headliner is starting to become a problem. But last summer I met a fellow Gen3 owner at a car show who supposedly knows somebody who makes replacement headliner out of fiberglass. Hard, one-piece, paintable, and never needs replacing. Costs in the $200 range IIRC. Admittedly, this is just for the T-top model; unsure if they do one for the steel roof (might be too much weight hanging over everybody’s heads?). I’m still waiting for this guy to contact me with the glasser’s contact info, but if he doesn’t I’ll be seeing him around come spring/summer… by which time I will probably be sick enough of my sagging headliner to make the swap (assuming the FG replacement ceiling is really as good as it sounds).
That’s all I have for the moment, but if any Gen3 F-body (w/ T-tops) owners out there would like for me to pass along more info about this when that info becomes available to me, you can reach me via my website link above this message. As I say, it will probably be months before I can actually help you, but I will get back to you once I know something more definite.
A very nice job.
And this reminds me: does anybody know how to remove headliner from a 1997 Tahoe?
Mine isn’t sagging, but this spring I’m going to improve the interior sound isolation and would like to put some isolation under the roof, too.
Great minds and all that.
I did this a week ago on my son’s ’06 Mazda6. (Apaprently this is common in Mazdas of that vintage. I like the car, but there are quite a few annoying little quality things like that that for example my ’02 Subaru doesn’t have.)
If you do not need a special color, you can buy the material at you local JoAnn fabric (black, tan or gray). I needed gray, and though it’s a shade or two darker than the original it looks fine. Definitely cheaper; It was on sale for $11/yd and I had a 15% off coupon, so about $35 for 3 yards.
The glue is available at your local auto parts store – sold specifically for headliners – $11/ can; I used two. It’s strong stuff though. You need to be really sure everything is line up before you let the new headliner touch the backer board!
Finished product:
As Aaron said, getting it out was the biggest challenge. I googled and found some very detailed instructions for my specific car on WLSHeadliners.com; my guess is that similar instructions are available for a lot of cars. It took me about 3hours as well (but it would have been a lot longer without the disassembly instructions). Oh, and being in San Diego, I was able to do it outside – in February – avoiding the glue smells.
Aaron, I can’t get enough of your posts about this awesome car. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s more than a little jealous. 🙂 Looking forward to the next installment. (Cue Mike Post music from “The Rockford Files”…)
I did a 97 Saturn SL2 with furniture upholstery twist pins. Dozens of twist pins. Crude, fast, effective. Is GM worse than other companies?
Not entirely no, you can read about 10 year old Honda Civics or Toyotas with sagging headliners.
‘Tis why I prefer rubberized plastic over cloth, it feels cheap but lasts so much longer.
I used multi color thumb tacks to hold up the sagging headliner in my old chevette.
I did them by color in a spiral pattern from the round dome light.
It was a cheap colorful fix for a high school student.
But I probably would have done it the way you did had I had the info you did.
It looks great.
very nice! i wouldnt have bothered trimming much- just fold it over the edge and glue it down there as well. and i think the 77 works better if you put a thin coat on the board, and a thin coat on the material backing.
another headliner material option would have been a roll of the low-pile pep boys carpeting
I have a 80′ Cutlass wagon with original liner and no sag!
Cork screw pins. Makes the headliner look like it has stars in it. Takes mere minutes.
And people laugh at AMC’s one piece fiber formed headliners in the Ambassador and Matador as being “cheap”.
I need to do a variation this on the subject car of my final COAL entry coming up on Sunday. The headliner has already been replaced, but the material covering the sliding shade for the moonroof started to sag and detach, causing the shade to get hung up in its track. Unfortunately, getting the shade out involves removing the headliner, and if the factory service manual is to be believed, the only way to get the headliner out is to remove the rear glass. Not having a garage, that scares me just a bit! I wonder if it’s impossible to maneuver out through the door opening, or merely inadvisable?
I did my Jaguar XKS and it came out well. Now that I live in Southwest Florida I see several local shops that will do it all for $100.
I still remember the spay adhesive in my arm hairs.