With wanting to keep the car fairly stock looking I really didn’t make any major changes to the interior. Most of the original parts and panels were in decent shape with the exception of the rear plastic panels that stretch from behind the door all the way to the back corner of the hatch area. The panels were sun baked very, very bad, to the point that you could scratch off layers of plastic with your fingernails. Finding panels that are decent can prove difficult most are either in the same condition or worse being cut up for speaker installs at some point. I was able to find a nice set of tan panels but the color would not do. I used interior vinyl and plastic paint to recolor the panels. Unfortunately the color I used was a little off for the rest of the interior so this made painting the rest for the interior panels as well.
The good thing is that the color I choose to repaint the interior matched the new headliner almost perfectly. My neighbor and good friend helped me pull, tug, stretch, glue, and clamp the new headliner into a drum tight vision of perfection. I couldn’t believe how bad the original one looked are pulling it out and looking at it, but the new one looks as close to perfect as I think you can get.
The seats are still the originals and are looking quite worn. After searching and being unable to find something that I liked I decided to just put some slip covers on them until I could find something nicer and more comfortable, or I can get them recovered.
The next thing was to do something about the seat belts. These were BAD! The sun had baked these as well as the 30 odd years of wear. I looked into getting the professionally redone. That was way out of my price range, at about $350 to just have the front belts done. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I had my same neighbor that helped me with the headliner stitch the “new belts” together with his heavy duty sewing machine. I bought webbing that matched everything else at one of the local shops and I disassembled the retractors and put the new webbing in and reassembled everything.
The carpet was the last thing. I had ordered a brand new molded set of carpet for both the passenger area and the hatch area. I had an original hatch area carpet and it seems that at some point in the 5 years of production that the hatch area carpet changed. My original 76 carpet had a vinyl “hinge” where the rear seat hinge fold was. The later models apparently and the new reproduction carpet didn’t. With wanting to keep things original looking I decided this had to be fixed. I purchased a small piece of dark blue vinyl and proceeded to cut my brand new carpet… I sewed the small 1½ inch piece of vinyl in place and was finished.