I know this has been done as a writeup 2 times now but I figure I'd throw mine up so if anything was unclear in mine or the others it could hopefully be answered here or.... in the others. I decided to do a charcoal gray suede do to me buying 05 WRX seats and getting a black carpet, instead of the meshy boy swim shorts look of the WRX panels (admit it... you wore them, maybe still do!) I decided to keep the suede/acantara look and here's how I did it:
Materials/Tools
-Phillips Screwdriver
-3m High Strength 90 (Home Depot)
-Goo Gone
-X-Acto knife
-Sharpie
-SHORT Screws (1/4")
-Drill Bits
-Faux Suede with a good backing (Hancock Fabrics)
Cost
-3yds. of faux suede - $8 (use a coupon!! most fabric stores have a 40% off one in the paper)
-Glue - $12
-Screws - $2
TOTAL: $25
Assuming you can and already have removed your door panel, take a peak on the back side and notice the following:
What we want to focus on are these guys:
We are going to want to drill them out BUT not completely... Just enough to get the head off the plastic rivet, if you want you can drill about 1/8" down and then use an x-acto knife to knife away at the head
There's a total of 11 plastic rivets that need drilled and 3 phillips screws that need to be removed, once the heads are removed it will look like this:
Now once you have cleared the heads and screws carefully split the pieces, this may take some force but dont break anything, I found it best to work from one end to the other, if it doesn't want to split that means you havent removed enough of the rivet head. You will then have this:
Next you're going to want to get ahold of a corner of the fabric and start to peel it off, again some force will be needed but you'll be fine =]
Now we have this!!!
You will notice some left over residue from the OEM glue, I took a microfiber rag and some goo gone, this cleaned up to this:
The blue piece of alcantara still has some stickiness to it on the other side so put this on your new fabric to hold the two together so we can trace our new piece: