heinzboehmer's 2002 Topaz 6MT Coupe

[heinzboehmer]

Love how a plan comes together. I pulled this car out of the woods a couple years ago saving it from the scrap yard. Pretty cool how this part is making its way to California to live on.

Hell yeah! Thanks again for letting me know about it.

[heinzboehmer]

Alright, quick recap of the headliner adventure.

Here's the headliner in more detail.





There's a bit of mold on it, but that's to be expected for something that came out of a car that was abandoned in the woods. My plan is to clean it up mechanically as much as I can, then put it in some plastic bags with an ozone generator to fully kill everything. If anyone has experience with using ozone generators for this kind of stuff, I'd appreciate some guidance!

Improvised a box and packaging for the part by basically digging through my friend's recycling and pulling old pillows from his closet:







It's a bit ridiculous and shitty looking, but this thing is going overnight to California, so I think it'll be just fine. Will likely make it back home before me

[heinzboehmer]

Old headliner foam removed. I opted to buy some dish brushes and try to remove it manually in an attempt to cut down on the mess. The brushes I got had some plastic scrapers built into their heads which worked extremely well for scraping the foam up. I then used the actual brush part for the harder to reach areas.





The foam was easy enough to remove, but there's still a layer of old glue on the thing. I don't think I can remove it without damaging the material underneath, so just going to leave it.

There was also a bit of mold staining on the bottom corners. Tried spraying with some isopropyl alcohol and then hitting it with the brush. Got most of the stains out, but was also starting to mess up the material underneath, so I stopped. Good enough:




That's it for now on the headliner. Once I manage to buy the fabric, I'll give it a quick pass with the drill brush attachment (to get any foam that I might have missed by hand), stick it in a bag with the ozone generator, give it a quick scuff with some sandpaper and reupholster it.

Also, since the slicktop homelink bracket is NLA, I decided to just get a homelink mirror instead. Ended up with a ridiculous amount of them, as I also retrofitted a homelink 4 module into a friend's mirror:



Along with the mirror, I also built an E8x/E9x dashcam adapter harness thing for said friend:



M3 got a short, grey clown nose mirror with the homelink buttons. It also came with a compass, but I decided to disable it. TIS wiring diagrams made it seem like the compass runs off of the shared 12V rail in the mirror, so I didn't even try pulling wires from the connector to see if one of them disabled it. Instead, I just removed the GND jumper from the daughter board of the compass screen (J6) so that it can't turn on. I also put some tesa tape on top of the screen, as you can just barely make out its outline if the light hits the mirror just right. much harder to do so with the tape:





And lastly, just a quick note to my future self: guitar pick is absolutely the best way to open these things up. Slip it in somewhere (homelink mirrors have a nice little cutout in the surround near the buttons), then run it around the perimeter of the mirror. Pick is flexible enough to get underneath the edge of the surround and also soft enough to not leave any marks: