OK, yesterday was carpet fitting day.
First off was to strip out the interior, only 4 easy bolts for each seat, easy removal of seat belts, the rear seat cushion just pulls out, and then remove the parcel shelf and kick panels - this was a bit fiddly but got there in the end. Here it is all stripped out:
Then offer up the sill carpet piece - this needed a tiny amount of trimming to sit nicely, and I also undid the outer sill covers to lift the lip on the inside so the carpet will slip underneath it.Then a squirt of spray adhesive to the inner sill, and the same to the back of the carpet piece, and in it goes - here is the passenger side done:
The driver's side was done in the same way, and both looked fine to me.
Then on with the front wheelarch carpet covers - no trimming required, these mould by hand to the double curvature of the wheelarch, and ended up looking very pro!
Next up was the rear valence under the rear seat - this has a thin strip of vinyl that folds over the top - tricky to get no wrinkles in this, but I managed it. This too was secured using spray adhesive:
Then I stuck the supplied pieces of underfelt to the gearbox and propshaft tunnels, and then glued the carpet on top - leaving parts of it un-glued so that I can lift it to adjust the handbrake and get at the gearbox filler plug.
Then the rear floor carpet followed by the front floor capet go in - at this stage my hands were covered in sticky glue and carpet fluff, and as I've now finished using the glue, I took my chance to clean my hands. White spirit cleans this stuff off nicely, which is also what I used to remove glue over-spray from the top side of the carpet and other bits of trim where you don't want to see the glue - works very well this.
I fixed the floor carpets in using the supplied pop-studs, which means they are easily removable. Here are the passenger's side carpets in and fitted.
Driver's side going in:
A bit of under-felt goes in under the floor carpets, here is the driver's footwell under-felt cut roughly to size:
And finally with a quick vacuum out of all the fluff, here is the carpet set fitted. This stage took all day - quite time-consuming but very satisfying:
Today I fitted the seat-belts and the seats back into the car, I used a sharply pointed bradawl to "find" the holes under the carpet for the bolts to go back in, and then a pointed scalpel to cut out holes in the carpets for the bolts to go through. The most tricky part was poking around with the bradawl to "find" the holes for the self-tappers to put the gearbox lever surround and the ash-tray back on - managed it in the end though! Here it is all fitted back up and ready to go:
You will see that I've left off the parcel shelf and the footwell kick-panels, as these were pretty manky when I took them out, and are very cheap to replace so as the parcel shelf is fiddly to re-fit, I'm going to leave it until the new parts arrive. You don't notice them missing when you drive the car.
I have to say that the quality of the carpet kit supplied by Charles Ware MM centre (Newton Commercial products) was superb, both in the cutting/preparing and in the actual quality of the material used. The gearbox and transmission tunnel items are fully moulded too, so they look really good.
More updates to follow!
