[Shop-talk] falling headliner fix?

[John Miller]

> I have battled this several times and have come to the conclusion that
> there is no adequate substitute for pulling out the headliner and
> recovering.

Yeah, either the glue fails or the backing deteriorates with the glue. 
In either case, you've got little crumbs of stuff rattling around in there.

The answer depends on the acceptable level of ghetto.

The only way you're going to get it to look 'right', if that matters, is 
to remove it from the car and redo the whole thing.  That means removing 
all the fabric, cleaning off all the crumbly stuff, you may need new 
fabric, etc.

Neighbor had one done locally (SF Peninsula) for I think $125 a few 
months back.

Bear in mind that body style (wagons/hatchbacks easy, many sedans/coupes 
will require removing the rear window) and features (how is it 
finished/retained around the sunroof opening, how many roof-mounted 
lights/vents/video displays/etc. are there) will drive the R&R difficulty.

If what you're looking for is 'keep this thing off my hair until I can 
scrap the car' I've seen a car where the owner slit the headliner across 
the car and cleaned out enough cruft to get some glue up there that 
seemed to hold well enough and I've seen one car where the owner went at 
it with some heavy fishing line and one of those long curved 
turkey-sewing needles.  Both were functional, neither was an aesthetic 
success.

Nothing you can just push in from the bottom will hold, it'll just pull 
out of the fiber backing.  Maybe one of those big plastic threaded 
drywall-screw inserts if you cut off the projecting tip and start a 
hole...but I'd guess trying to put a screw in it will strip it out of 
the backing in a hurry.

John.