Chapter 2
Tearing into the Interior

by Ryan King
Edited by Patricia Kalin
5/08

I’d like to point out that when I used the phrase “easy fixin’” in Chapter 1, I was using it in relation to the ’87 Sedan.

That’s an important distinction to make here, because I think there will be a number of people that will point out that what I’ve chosen to do here isn’t “easy.” But, again “easy” is all relative to what you consider hard. Falling out of bed is easy. By comparison, the landing is hard. Saying the Project Commuter is “easy fixin’” is easy, fixing it, not quite so much.

As I saw it, I had two “major” repairs to do to the interior not counting replacement of the center armrest with an armrest delete plate (the armrests in these cars get in the way of my elbow during shifting). I needed to lubricate the driver side front seat belt retractor because it was squealing in my ear, and I wanted to remove the window tinting.

In my defense, it all looked very easy on paper.

For example, the seat belt: Remove the rear seat, remove the driver side interior quarter panel, lubricate the seat belt retractor, and reassemble. There. See? Easy.

That isn’t exactly how it worked in reality.

Disassembly

Here’s a play-by-play synopsis of the procedure needed to remove the seat belt, contrasted against my fantasies.

Fantasy: Remove the rear seat.

Reality: Wait, it doesn’t actually start there. The instructions say to remove the lower and upper seat belt bolts first. Then remove the rear seat starting with the seat bottom.

To remove the seat bottom, it involves applying downward pressure on the front of the seat while simultaneously driving it backwards.

I know this procedure. I’ve done it lots of times on Sedans. This became an unexpected object lesson in the differences between a Sedan and a Hatchback. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a simple task on a Sedan either, but the Hatch – at least this Hatch – was about three times as difficult. Once I’d done enough circus tricks and applied enough pressure, it did come out…in about an hour.

That’s right, an hour.

You probably already know that isn’t a great way to start a project.

Reality wasn’t through, though. I had to remove the retractable luggage cover before I got to pull the seat backs out.

Step one for seat back removal (as explained in the factory repair manual): pop the plastic retainers (similar to those on the door or kick panels) used to hold down the seat back carpet at the bottom of the seat backs.

Okay.

Simple solution, grab my trusty plastic retainer removal tool, insert, and the retainer happily gives up its hold on the seat back.

Nope. Not so easy.

The seat back carpet isn’t held down with plastic retainers, it’s held down with screws that are hidden in the pile of the carpet.

Well, not any more (at least not by the same number as before).

It tore the screw and female threads in the plastic seat back right out. Insert a random array of inflammatory language; mark one repair to do before I put the interior back together and move on.

NOW the seat backs can finally be removed by way of the bolts that attach them to the folding arms on their respective outer edges.

But wait, there’s more.

Just like a bad infomercial.

I noticed as I perused the heads of the bolts – that I had to remove to get the seat backs free of the folding arms – that one was different.

Yes, just like that innocuous game you may have played as a child to teach you how to distinguish one thing from another, – and ultimately lead the cool kids to ostracize you from their little club of quarrelling and backstabbing – I noticed one was a little different from the rest (see Chapter 2 Work Photos: Stage 1 Interior Repair).

Turns out someone decided to jam a fastener with screw threads into a hole with machine threads.

I was ecstatic to say the least.

Insert more inflammatory language here, jot down another repair to do before reassembly and move on.

Fantasy: Remove the driver side interior quarter panel.

Reality: Start removing the driver side interior quarter panel by removing the driver side rear speaker. No problems there, that part was easy, but the next six steps of varying difficulty made the job a lot more complicated than “remove the driver side interior quarter panel” sounded. Those steps included removing the interior quarter front seat belt hole trim piece, the scuff plate, the rear and side headliner trim (which caused me to break the upper front mount tab of both the quarter and the A-pillar trim; again causing the need for a tedious repair), the rear seat belt lower anchor bolt, the driver side seatback folding arm, and an array of screws that vary in their ease of access. Then the driver side interior quarter panel came out.

Fantasy: Remove the driver side front seat belt.

Reality: Finally a reality that matched the fantasy. That’s because there was only one bolt holding it in. I probably should have spent more time savoring the experience. Instead I chose to charge forward.

With the interior apart, I had a new list of minor repairs to add to the seat belt “repair.” They consisted of: repairing the stripped screw hole in the back of the driver side seat back, replacing the incorrect bolt and corresponding damaged U-nut that attached the passenger side folding arm to the rear seat back, repairing the broken mounting tab on the interior quarter panel (as well as an inch long crack that started in the shock access hole), refinishing the scuffed, scratched and rusted rear headliner trim panel, and finally derusting various brackets, fasteners, and exposed body sections (such as screw holes to help keep the cancer from spreading).

Repair

Fantasy: Lubricate the seat belt retractor to fix the squeal.

Reality: Give the seat belt retractor the once, twice, and third time over to confirm what I realized after the once over.

The retractor doesn’t have any external oiling points.

At an impasse, I try to research the seat belt retractor assembly on my own. I find no information anywhere, including the factory repair manual.

After that, I expand my search and call the Ford dealership and explain the situation.

I’m told, “You can’t lubricate it, it’s a sealed assembly that can’t be taken apart.”

Makes sense, I guess. It’s safer that way; no one can screw it up.

Frustrated, I talk to Don at the parts counter. He tells me that he’s found them at an obsolete parts house, but that they are $350 a pop.

Ooo, that smarts.

Instead, I attempt to lubricate the retractor with spray Teflon. Low and behold, it works and the squeal is fixed. But wait there’s more…later.

Fantasy: Repair the stripped screw hole in the back of the driver side seat back.

Reality: Surprisingly enough, another reality that matched the fantasy. It was quite easy using a methacrylate adhesive. If you’re unfamiliar with plastic repair, methacrylate adhesive is similar to cyanoacrylate adhesive (more commonly known as “super glue”). Like cyanoacrylate adhesive, it sets extremely rigid (so it won’t work on a flexible surface), but because it’s a solid rather than a thin liquid or gel – similar to a two part thermoset polyurethane – it does a fantastic job of repairing threads that don’t see a lot of stress. I was even able to get one that had the solid component in black to match the color of the seat back.

Fantasy: Replace the damaged U-nut that attached the passenger side folding arm to the seat back as well as the corresponding bolt that ruined the nut in the first place.

Reality: Okay, I didn’t have any pie in the sky concept of an easy job with this.

Why?

Because I knew I was going to have to root around in a junkyard to find what I wanted.

I didn’t expect to have to make a 20-mile trip to find a junkyard that had what I was looking for (the local U-pick-it yard usually has these cars). Besides that, it was what I expected, replete with the need to derust and refinish them once I got them.

Fantasy: Repair the tab and crack in the driver side interior quarter panel.

Reality: It seemed straightforward.

Of course, I didn’t really know what I was doing when I started this repair. I learned as I went.

Consequently I went for a LOT longer than expected, eventually abandoning the tab repair.

Not that it couldn’t have been accomplished, just not the way I was doing it. I know that now. I also know how to do it; so in the future I will be able to do it correctly.

The only reason I was doing it was to keep the rattles down in the interior, since that’s effectively all this tab did.

Thankfully, my experience gave me the necessary skill to repair the crack, which went better than I imagined (and is almost invisible from the outside), which is what I was looking for.

Fantasy: Refinish the rear headliner trim panel.

Reality: Wow, this sounded a WHOLE LOT easier than I made it. It’s important that I make note of the fact that I made it more difficult than it needed to be. What’s truly funny is that the actual refinishing was the easiest part and turned out stupendously, even though I had no real prior painting experience.

To be fair though, I’d been studying incessantly. It was the prep work that mired the process in repetition.

My problems started with stripping, which meant they started early on. While cleaning was the first step, stripping was the next. After applying EFS-2500 to the part, I proceeded to scrape it off with a plastic body filler spreader. When it didn’t all come off, I did it again. When it still didn’t come off, I repeated the process until I realized that it wasn’t going to come off using that method because the texture of the part was keeping the spreader from reaching the paint in the recesses.

After a few weekends of doing this (the EFS-2500 needed to sit overnight each time to be effective), I got smart and used a brass bristled brush (to keep from putting scratches in the substrate with a steel brush). Low and behold, it stripped just fine.

EFS-2500 isn’t a solvent, it works by penetrating the paint and breaking its bond to the substrate (see the EFS-2500 article in Reviews for more information). Thus, it usually requires some form of agitation to come off. On the other side of the coin, it’s much safer for the environment than regular strippers.

When I did finally get the paint off, I ran into another problem…lots of rust. Before I began removing the paint, there were a few small spots of rust on the front of panel in the scratches (and in large patches on the back where there was no paint and the galvanizing had broken down). However, after I removed the paint, and repeatedly washed off the EFS-2500 residue between each application, it had become a completely rusty mess. Not beyond saving, but no longer isolated in spots. The real negative part of that was that in order to remove the rust, I had to use a rust remover that would remove the galvanized coating that remained, which meant it would lose a lot of its corrosion resistance.

I didn’t want to use any primers (this was how it was painted at the factory) because I didn’t want to chance getting the coating too thick – thus hiding the texture of the part – I had to make darned certain that the part was completely rust free. That took several tries as I figured out a method that utilized a combination of products and timing to get it ready to paint. I had a local paint shop mix the factory color into a rattle can and off I went. The results were everything I had hoped for, and looked every bit as good as the original.

Fantasy: Derust various fasteners, brackets and body spots.

Reality: When a lot of people think of derusting, they think of grinding, wire brushing, or sanding. Still, others think of acid dipping. For me, all of these methods are usually too aggressive, because they alter the original condition of the part too much. Like an archeologist, or an art restorer, I prefer to use non-destructive methods such as non-caustic liquids and gels that will attack only rust, leaving the metal in great shape, ready to be refinished just like the original. At least, as close to the original condition as the severity of the rust allows. Some of the advantages of this approach is that I can remove rust from painted items, have the paint unaffected, and follow it up with an application of a surface conditioner or finish that will protect the exposed metal underneath and keep it from rusting in the future, while not having to refinish the entire piece. Case in point was the driver side rear seat back folding arm. Its paint was still in great shape, but it wasn’t painted completely at the factory. So, it was rusting pretty aggressively in those areas that were left bare. I was able to derust them with a gel and cover it with a clear anti-rust coating, thus repairing and maintaining the original look without doing a great deal of work.

The fasteners were a different story. I was able to easily derust them, but I didn’t have the ability to recoat them in black manganese phosphate as they were originally. Instead, I used a black oxide surface treatment process. Although not as resistant to corrosion, it looks almost exactly the same (and should be good enough for the interior since they don’t see much direct moisture).

The body sections provided the most difficulty, due to how hard they were to access. Almost every fastener hole in the body had aggressive rust in it. While that may not seem like a problem, considering the strength and depth of threads in the sheet metal, they couldn’t afford to deteriorate too far. I erred on the side of caution, and removed that rust as well. It was also helpful to keep from making the freshly finished hardware rusted again (as contact with rust will allow it to spread to the screws).

The most difficult part came with rust imbedded in a number of plastic parts, and as much as I wished there was a non-abrasive method to get that out of plastic, I don’t know of one. Instead, I carefully ground as little plastic as possible to get the rust out. In some cases, the rust wasn’t actually imbedded in the plastic. It was shards of metal from the body, imbedded and rusting. The only solution, of course, was to dig the shards out carefully.

Assembly

With the weeks of repairs taken care of, I got to get started on the reassembly of the interior. This didn’t go quite as well as I had hoped either. The whole process seemed pretty straightforward: install the seat belt, install the interior quarter, install headliner trim and scuff plate, install the rear seat backs, install the rear seat base, and voila it is done.

Wait, I think I was wrong. I was just so used to everything being a trial that I was having trouble comprehending the ease with which the interior went together…well, sorta. Let me explain.

Outside of discovering the threads on the seat belt retractor bolt and those in the body weren’t in the greatest of shape, it went in smoothly. I even progressed onto getting the interior quarter panel in, but as soon as I accomplished that, I discovered the squeal had returned.

I got to take it all apart again and start from square one.

Okay, maybe square two.

Which is to say, I had to find a suitable replacement BLACK seat belt.

FYI, there weren’t a lot of black interiors made (and I didn’t want to spend $350 on a seat belt assembly).

Luckily, I was able to find an entire set on the other side of the country for less than half the price of the one new seat belt. They were in great shape, and I was able to get the seat belt I needed installed without climbing over any more obstacles.

Window Tinting Removal

As you may have noticed, that still leaves removing the window tinting. I did some research, but I’d never done it before. So, I had fantasies about it peeling off like cellophane on a plate. That was kind of right, but not exactly.

The window tinting peeled right off with little drama. The adhesive that held it on the windows didn’t. I was prepared, though – window-tinting remover in hand – but it wasn’t as simple as a Karate Kid wipe-on, wipe-off training regimen. No, it was like a real Karate training regimen. Spray on, soak, spray again to reactivate and – with a razor blade – carefully scrape it off for hours. Did I mention that a razor blade wouldn’t work on the silk-screened areas or rear window defroster grid? That had to be laboriously worked over with a toothbrush. There is a lot of silk screening in ’87-’93 Mustangs, so it took days of work. I even made the mistake of trying to cut a fat hog by removing as much of the window tinting goo as I could with a razor blade, nice and close to the defroster grid.

Did I mention “try?” I cut right through one of the defroster grid lines.

Thankfully I was able to get a repair kit for it and repair it.

Lesson learned.

I cleaned the rest of the grid with a toothbrush, only. Slowly. That hatch window has a LOT of real estate.

I’m just glad it’s over. Now on to bigger beasts: The drivetrain.

Check out Chapter 3 as I continue to whip this pony back into fighting shape!

Click image for Chapter 2 Work Photos.