1969 Camaro Headliner

This is a basic headliner installation with a couple of new wrinkles thrown in. The installation starts where most GM headliners that are hung from bows start, in the middle.

The center listing, instead of having a metal bow, has a piece of paper covered stake wire inserted into the listing, and then the listing is pushed onto a series of teeth that go from one side to the other on the center roof support. This stake wire was in bad shape, so I replaced it. After centering the middle listing, the teeth are clinched shut, the rest of the bows are inserted into the rest of the listings, the bows are hung from their holes on each side of the car's roof, and the headliner fabric is stretched into place and glued down. The new wrinkle here is that the metal bows get snapped into plastic retainers that run down the center of the car's roof. The plastic retainers are mounted into a slot that allows them to slide from front to back as the headliner fabric is stretched from the middle to the front and from the middle to the back. I was really worried that the retainers would break as I took down the bows, but all of them stayed intact. If they had broken, I would have had to come up with another way to hold the bows in place. The retainers added another step to preparing the headliner for installation. I didn't want to snap the bows into place with the listing covering the bows, so after finding the middle of each listing, I cut an opening in the listing that exposed the bow. I also marked the center of each bow with a magic marker before sliding them into their respective listings, which made it easy to center the headliner. The nice part about this headliner was the trim that covered the edges. It just pushed on , and made finishing the job a breeze.

The headliner that was in the car was absolutely the worst installation of a headliner I have ever seen. Whoever replaced the original did a horrible job. The picture shows
the old wrinkled headliner laying on the floor. The wrinkles you see are actually better than what it looked like in the car.

Here are the pictures of the process.


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Here are the rest of the pictures.

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__________________
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No one lives forever, the trick is creating something that will.
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