so we are driving to a show doing about 60 down the freeway and my black vinyl headliner starts i guess filling with air and coming down in the middle like a tarp would filled with water. i mean way down like between both our heads and touching our shoulders (the car is really chopped but it still came far down).now i can feel the bows under the headliner but i think they are not attached or my upholstery guy thinks they maybe are not the right type of rod. when the roof was bowing down attacking me it didnt seem like it had any form like the bows were bending it was just a blob. so i think they are not attached. but the real problem i believe is it might be getting air under the headliner somehow and pooling up but only at high speeds. also a friend of mine says it might even be vacuum since i have no p***enger and driver windows yet. now to the questions ive went around most of the edges i could get to with some silicone and it still has the problem. Is that the normal cause for something like this or is it vacuum? i guess i could go around and seal it more and my upholstery guy said bring it back tommorrow and he'd pull the headliner and see waht he can do but if i can fix it b4 then its a plus for me. any suggestions?
My guess would be a vacuum caused by lack of windows. Had a similar problem with a car a few years ago. You can't really fix the vacuum too much...who wants to drive around with windows up all the time? The ultimate problem in my case was the headliner bows not attached to the roof in the center. With pretty much all the cars I have had, except this particular one, the headliner bows have some sort of clip or welded tap on the roof that clips or bends around the the bow when it's put in to hold it up against the vacuum. Is there any way you can add such a thing to yours?
i will try and have my upholsterer do that i guess i will have to let him pull the headliner and check it
damn my upholstery guy cant do it he said he cant get the right bow material and i dont have any clips on the roof to attach the bows that are there any suggestions?
If you can get them, double up on the bows or take them out and bend them to give them more crown. The headliner should still fit right but the bows will be pressing against the roof of the car harder.
It sounds to me like your upholstery guy doesnt want to do it! You can make head liner bows yourself, All you need is a loop in the back side of your headliner to run them thru...I have made my own bows for several cars... or you can do it the fast and ghetto way and 3m glue it up to the top but it wont last that long with the sun beating down on your most likely black roof. I live in So. Cal. too...let me know if you need help Mike
man id love to fix it myself and learn a thing or two what about making a couple of slits on the headliner to allow the air to get out will that help?
To get you by untill you can have it properly repaired go to home depot in the molding department, they have battens that are plastic/styrene material, very thin and cheap (1.19) buy several, put one end inside garnish moulding bow it up tight inside roof mark where other end would fit opposite side garnish and cut it. Install several to hold up liner untill you get it fixed. Works good. Mark
Back in the 70's, GM switched headliner construction from bows to a piece of molded foam with some rubber and then the headliner glued to it...after a few years' exposure to reality, the rubber turned into dust and dropped the headliner onto the p***engers. Standard cure was to rip everything out by the roots and consider the remaining piece of plastic to be the headliner, since none of these cars were worth actual repair... Anyhow, I once saw one of these cl***ix pinging its way down the highway with its six furrin looking occupants sitting with their heads tilted sideways in the curiously dark looking interior...as I pulled alongside, I saw that the entire headliner was now supported by two plastic McDonalds milkshake cups on the package shelf and three human arms farther forward...they all looked like they were used to this drill. Probably couldn't go anywhere unless they all went so the headliner was adequately supported... "Great Moments in Engineering History--Episode 936"
What kinda car is it? Is the body work finished? On one of my wagons, I did a custom headliner that required new brackets to hang it from. I just made the brackets and spot welded them to the roof. You could do the same for bow clips if'n you don't mind burn marks on your roof....***uming it's a metal roof and not a rod with an insert. Slits in the headliner to "let the air out" won't help, because the problem isn't actually air getting in above the headliner....it's actually a vacuum pulling the headliner down.
Is it possible that air is getting around the windshield gasket and filling the space between the roof and the headliner? If not epoxy wood blocks of the correct thickness between the bows and the roof and clamp the bow to the wood block with a metal clip screwed on one end so you can slide the bow under it.
dont do that... those slits will just become bigger slits and eventually ruin the headliner. try installing washers on the ends of each bow to tighten then up. also to make sure its a vac***e issue cover up the windows with some plastic and drive it. just to make sure you aren't barking up the wrong tree.
Probably don't wanna weld against that. I am not familar with the shoebox headliners specifically, but surely there is something missing here that the bows sag back down...either wrong bows or right bows put in wrong. This should be on the upholstery guy to make right.
Exactly same thing happened on my buddies chopped 50 shoebox. Seems like the bows are not attached to anything, our windows were down also, so must have created a va***?
That's some funny **** man. I had a '63 Impala that used to do that when all the windows were down but that's still some funny ****. Ok sorry I laughed at ya. my impala had the headliner broke loose from the bows when we pulled it to check it out. I haven't a clue why it would go back up when it was sitting.
im still thinking there has to be air getting under it since it looks like a beach ball filling with air or if your under a canopy when lots of water is trapped on it
thanks everyone for your input i got the roof fixed myself took down the headliner near the rear side windows and found out the bows had all shifted in the mounts so they were not bound up against the roof correctly anyway messed with them a bit and viola just need to glue it back up on the sides and im done!
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