deadlydave
07-30-2007, 10:10 PM
Alright, here goes. Feel free to post comments and questions. Part 2 coming soon. This carpeting fits fine in the front but the back requires a lot of work, and DO NOT throw out your old carpet, and be patient.
Before:
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/1.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/2.jpg
After:
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/after1.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/after2.jpg
Alright, here's my DIY on 04-05 Impreza STi carpeting in a BD Legacy Sedan.
Tools:
-Metric socket set, 10mm, 12mm, 14mm, and a good ratchet. Also, you could use wrenches of the same size.
-A breaker bar would have been helpful, but I just put a lacrosse shaft on the end of my ratchet and it worked fine.
-An assortment of flathead and phillips screwdrivers, mainly for prying stuff and removing the center console.
-A knife, box cutter, or razor blade w/handle.
-A little box to keep bolts, brads, and fasteners in once removed.
Suppplies:
-An old newspaper.
-Your old carpet and all foam padding from it.
-Any tape but clear tape.
-Patience. Seriously.
Time to completion:
About 8 hours total, spread over 2 days.
Would have gone faster, but I don't have a garage and upstate NY rained on me and forced me to stop.
It only takes 1.5-2 hours to get all the old stuff out.
Difficulty:
On a scale of 1-10, it's a 2 if you have some imagination, and a 5 if you have rocks in your skull.
Tips:
-Rip off small pieces of tape, and tape them to bolts, nuts, and fasteners with a couple of words about where they go. There are a lot of little things, it's impossible to remember them all unless you've had your interior apart often.
-Keep all your removed little bits in above mentioned box
-Garage is preferred
-Bring a friend
Procedure: Seat removal
-Back seat is easy, use the 12mm socket and ratchet to pull the bolts out that hold the front of the bottom of the rear seat on. Push down on the middle of the seat, against where the top meets the bottom, and lift up and out on the front. Pull out the seat.
-Front seat is easy too, just with 5 bolts. Slide the front seat of your choice back all the way on the rails. Use the 14mm socket and ratchet to loosen and remove the bolt at the front of each rail. I didn't need to use my makeshift breaker bar for this. Next, slide the seat all the way forward, and hop in the back. You should see a plastic cover behind each of the seat rails. You could attempt to gently work one off with a flathead screwdriver, but I found pulling one off by just grabbing it yanking worked just as well. Remove the second cover. Now, 3 bolts should be exposed, all with 14mm heads. The one closest to the car door will come out the easiest, take care of this one first. Now, let's focus on the 2 bolts nearest to the center console. One should have a bright gold color, and the other should look like the one you just removed. I took out the shiny one first :-). Now, there was but 1 bolt holding the seat on, and after wrenching on it I could not move it at all. I just slid a spare lacrosse stick shaft down onto the end of the ratchet, and used it as a bigger lever. This got the bolt moving. Keep going with this as long as you need it, I had to use it for a really long time. Once you get this bolt out, you'll notice the tip of the bolt is really rusty, hence the PITA. Fold The seat up, and pull it out of the car. Repeat with the other front seat. I did the rear seat first, then the trim, then the front seats.
Procedure: Trim and console removal
The easiest is the trim around the pedals--there is a plastic strip there to prevent the gas pedal from getting stuck on the carpet. It's hard to get to, but easy to remove. It's held on with 2 plastic things, both of which can be unscrewed. Then the entire piece falls right off. The console top will need to be removed to get it around the shifter. Open the console cargo bin thing, and unscrew the 2 screws holding the top on. Make sure your e-brake is in the upright position, then pull the 1st piece off. The 2nd piece is only clipped on, but you'll have to move the shifter down to get it off. I put it in "1" on my 4eat, and then pulled up the trim from the black part, turned it 90 degrees, and pulled it off. Unscrew the 3 screws in the bottom of your center console cargo bin, the 2 screws between the ebrake and the shifter, and the 2 screws ahead of the shifter. Then, pull it up and back, and it's off.
Only 6 pieces of plastic trim left to remove. They are the plastic door sills, and the piece on the inside of the pillars between front and rear doors. You must be very gentle, I snapped almost all the bottom clips off. Each piece is attached with several plastic clips, that go into plastic holders in the door frame of the car. We'll start with the front. Pull out the plastic brad that secures the front top of the door sill to the frame. I used a flathead screwdriver. Then, one by one, using a thin screwdriver, pop each clip out of it's holder between the door sill and the door frame. Then, pull it forward and into the passenger compartment to free it completely. Now, the door pillar plastic piece. Pull out the brad, and the 2nd part of it that stuck in the hole. That's pretty much the only thing holding this on, so just pull the front and back of the pillar cover away from the door frames and back into the cabin of the car. Think about it like opening a book with the pages facing away from you and the binding toward you. The back piece has the same clips as the front, but the plastic brad is sitting where it meets the rear seat trim, a few inches to the rear of the chassis support bar. Pop that out with a flathead screwdriver.
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/4.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/5.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/6.jpg
Procedure: Carpet removal
Now you're ready to rock, start pulling out all the plastic brads you see holding the carpet to the body, there were 2 under each front seat, and 3 holding the back edge on, where the carpet goes under where the back seat was. Start on the driver's side, and pull the carpet up front to back, folding it toward the middle of the car. Now, remember that newspaper from the supplies list? When you start to pull up the passenger side front of the carpeting, yours may be attached to the front of the floor pan with tar. When the carpet is free of the tar, stick a sheet of newspaper onto the tar on the carpet. Fold the carpet in half, along the transmission tunnel, pull it off over the shifter and e-brake, and take it out of the car. Thus concludes part 1.
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/7.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/3.jpg
Part 2!
Procedure: Carpet install
The first thing to do is vacuum and windex/paper towel the interior clean. You may also find a fair amount of change. Next, you'll notice that the front of the STi carpet has several thin strips that go over the transmission tunnel. The frontmost one should be snipped off, at least for my Automatic LSi. Next, stick the carpet in the car, and work it down over the ebrake and shifter. Try to make it as even as possible, left to right. Firstly, you'll notice that it sits in the floorpan alright. Sweet. You'll also notice that most of the holes that you'll need are nonexistant. The carpeting is also 4-5 inches short. Not so sweet. Here's where the imagination comes in. There are 3 possible solutions for the shortness:
1. Shift the whole carpet back, and re-cut holes for the underseat vents, and cut some of your old carpet to fill the front gap
2. Cut the carpet in half, and use a strip of your old carpet in the middle as a patch.
3. Align it with the front of the carpet, and cut the back 8-12 inches off the old carpet as a patch.
I chose option 3, which I'll discuss when I get to it. Assuming you follow the same path as me, you've lined up the front of the carpeting. On the driver's side, you'll notice that the dead pedal does indeed have 2 holes for it in the carpeting, but they don't line up to the correct holes in the body. Since there were 2 holes there, i used those anyway. Bang, the first holder was in. You could use bolts or something instead of the plastic brads if you wanted a more secure mount, but I didn't care. Next, I got the plastic piece of trim that protects the pedal from sticking on the carpet, and popped that in using the 2 plastic brads for that particular piece. I then flattened the carpet as best I could over the vents on the floor. Using a knife and my finger, felt under the carpeting for the 2 holes that attached the old carpet to the floor. Once I found 'em, I poked my knife through each in a star shape. Stuck the brads in next. Take the seatbelt, and work it through the notch for it in the carpet. As you're working on this project, you should be flattening the carpet out as often as possible. Once you have this done, start looking to line up the seat bolt holes from the carpet to the floor. Whenever you find one pretty much lined up, stick a bolt in there to hold it in place. Remember that mad rusty bolt from the seat, the one that goes through the transmission tunnel wall? Well, it's a pain in the ass, yet again, because you have to cut a hole for it. If you just cut a slit, it doesn't work real well, so cut a dime-sized hole in the carpeting, then stick the bolt in and give it a few turns. We'll worry about the trunk release lever and cover when we get the whole carpet secured. There is a metal box, with wires going in and out of it, right under the passenger seat (or where it would be). Now, the carpet isn't meant for this box, so I just kinda forced it over by caving in the bottom of the carpet upwards to allow for the box. If you're really motivated, you can make relief cuts in the carpet for the box, but my method works fine, since the seat's going over top of it anyway. Repeat the same steps as the driver's side(minus the pedal plastic stuff) for the passenger side. Now, it's time for the back.
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/short.jpg
Procedure: Carpet modification
Alright, so the back doesn't fit. And the hole for the trunk and gas tank release doesn't look so well lined up. But trudge onward. There are better ways to do this, than the one I chose, I'm sure. I made cuts where the horizontal and vertical parts of the carpet by the tranny tunnel meet and where the carpet bent up toward the door, where it meets the seats. I then took the back of the original carpeting, and slid it in underneath. I then tacked it down using the 3 plastic brads that originally held it down, underneath where the rear seat mounts. From here, I trimmed the carpeting so it would rest flat in the floor pans on each side, and rounded the corners a little. The center of the carpeting, I could not get the top of the carpet,above the tranny tunnel, to lie flat. I had a piece of rubber mat lying around, and I cut it to fit over the tranny tunnel. For now, I used black corrugated household wire covering to border the STi carpeting where it meets the gray legacy carpeting. It looks alright, but I'm going to get a large piece of blue fabric to replace the gray carpet with. Then I'm going to get some red or pink vinyl string, and sew it to the STi carpeting. I really didn't think ahead, but probably should have just cut the carpet in the middle. There may be some wrinkles in the back carpeting, I solved that by sticking the floor foam padding from under the original carpet for the back. The fronts were pretty good, and my floor mats are huge, so they covered the real obvious wrinkles. I had tor trim around the trunk/fuel door release, because it was all bunched up. There was a 1" gap or so at the front. No biggie for me, because of the floor mats.
Before:
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/1.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/2.jpg
After:
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/after1.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/after2.jpg
Alright, here's my DIY on 04-05 Impreza STi carpeting in a BD Legacy Sedan.
Tools:
-Metric socket set, 10mm, 12mm, 14mm, and a good ratchet. Also, you could use wrenches of the same size.
-A breaker bar would have been helpful, but I just put a lacrosse shaft on the end of my ratchet and it worked fine.
-An assortment of flathead and phillips screwdrivers, mainly for prying stuff and removing the center console.
-A knife, box cutter, or razor blade w/handle.
-A little box to keep bolts, brads, and fasteners in once removed.
Suppplies:
-An old newspaper.
-Your old carpet and all foam padding from it.
-Any tape but clear tape.
-Patience. Seriously.
Time to completion:
About 8 hours total, spread over 2 days.
Would have gone faster, but I don't have a garage and upstate NY rained on me and forced me to stop.
It only takes 1.5-2 hours to get all the old stuff out.
Difficulty:
On a scale of 1-10, it's a 2 if you have some imagination, and a 5 if you have rocks in your skull.
Tips:
-Rip off small pieces of tape, and tape them to bolts, nuts, and fasteners with a couple of words about where they go. There are a lot of little things, it's impossible to remember them all unless you've had your interior apart often.
-Keep all your removed little bits in above mentioned box
-Garage is preferred
-Bring a friend
Procedure: Seat removal
-Back seat is easy, use the 12mm socket and ratchet to pull the bolts out that hold the front of the bottom of the rear seat on. Push down on the middle of the seat, against where the top meets the bottom, and lift up and out on the front. Pull out the seat.
-Front seat is easy too, just with 5 bolts. Slide the front seat of your choice back all the way on the rails. Use the 14mm socket and ratchet to loosen and remove the bolt at the front of each rail. I didn't need to use my makeshift breaker bar for this. Next, slide the seat all the way forward, and hop in the back. You should see a plastic cover behind each of the seat rails. You could attempt to gently work one off with a flathead screwdriver, but I found pulling one off by just grabbing it yanking worked just as well. Remove the second cover. Now, 3 bolts should be exposed, all with 14mm heads. The one closest to the car door will come out the easiest, take care of this one first. Now, let's focus on the 2 bolts nearest to the center console. One should have a bright gold color, and the other should look like the one you just removed. I took out the shiny one first :-). Now, there was but 1 bolt holding the seat on, and after wrenching on it I could not move it at all. I just slid a spare lacrosse stick shaft down onto the end of the ratchet, and used it as a bigger lever. This got the bolt moving. Keep going with this as long as you need it, I had to use it for a really long time. Once you get this bolt out, you'll notice the tip of the bolt is really rusty, hence the PITA. Fold The seat up, and pull it out of the car. Repeat with the other front seat. I did the rear seat first, then the trim, then the front seats.
Procedure: Trim and console removal
The easiest is the trim around the pedals--there is a plastic strip there to prevent the gas pedal from getting stuck on the carpet. It's hard to get to, but easy to remove. It's held on with 2 plastic things, both of which can be unscrewed. Then the entire piece falls right off. The console top will need to be removed to get it around the shifter. Open the console cargo bin thing, and unscrew the 2 screws holding the top on. Make sure your e-brake is in the upright position, then pull the 1st piece off. The 2nd piece is only clipped on, but you'll have to move the shifter down to get it off. I put it in "1" on my 4eat, and then pulled up the trim from the black part, turned it 90 degrees, and pulled it off. Unscrew the 3 screws in the bottom of your center console cargo bin, the 2 screws between the ebrake and the shifter, and the 2 screws ahead of the shifter. Then, pull it up and back, and it's off.
Only 6 pieces of plastic trim left to remove. They are the plastic door sills, and the piece on the inside of the pillars between front and rear doors. You must be very gentle, I snapped almost all the bottom clips off. Each piece is attached with several plastic clips, that go into plastic holders in the door frame of the car. We'll start with the front. Pull out the plastic brad that secures the front top of the door sill to the frame. I used a flathead screwdriver. Then, one by one, using a thin screwdriver, pop each clip out of it's holder between the door sill and the door frame. Then, pull it forward and into the passenger compartment to free it completely. Now, the door pillar plastic piece. Pull out the brad, and the 2nd part of it that stuck in the hole. That's pretty much the only thing holding this on, so just pull the front and back of the pillar cover away from the door frames and back into the cabin of the car. Think about it like opening a book with the pages facing away from you and the binding toward you. The back piece has the same clips as the front, but the plastic brad is sitting where it meets the rear seat trim, a few inches to the rear of the chassis support bar. Pop that out with a flathead screwdriver.
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/4.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/5.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/6.jpg
Procedure: Carpet removal
Now you're ready to rock, start pulling out all the plastic brads you see holding the carpet to the body, there were 2 under each front seat, and 3 holding the back edge on, where the carpet goes under where the back seat was. Start on the driver's side, and pull the carpet up front to back, folding it toward the middle of the car. Now, remember that newspaper from the supplies list? When you start to pull up the passenger side front of the carpeting, yours may be attached to the front of the floor pan with tar. When the carpet is free of the tar, stick a sheet of newspaper onto the tar on the carpet. Fold the carpet in half, along the transmission tunnel, pull it off over the shifter and e-brake, and take it out of the car. Thus concludes part 1.
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/7.jpg
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/3.jpg
Part 2!
Procedure: Carpet install
The first thing to do is vacuum and windex/paper towel the interior clean. You may also find a fair amount of change. Next, you'll notice that the front of the STi carpet has several thin strips that go over the transmission tunnel. The frontmost one should be snipped off, at least for my Automatic LSi. Next, stick the carpet in the car, and work it down over the ebrake and shifter. Try to make it as even as possible, left to right. Firstly, you'll notice that it sits in the floorpan alright. Sweet. You'll also notice that most of the holes that you'll need are nonexistant. The carpeting is also 4-5 inches short. Not so sweet. Here's where the imagination comes in. There are 3 possible solutions for the shortness:
1. Shift the whole carpet back, and re-cut holes for the underseat vents, and cut some of your old carpet to fill the front gap
2. Cut the carpet in half, and use a strip of your old carpet in the middle as a patch.
3. Align it with the front of the carpet, and cut the back 8-12 inches off the old carpet as a patch.
I chose option 3, which I'll discuss when I get to it. Assuming you follow the same path as me, you've lined up the front of the carpeting. On the driver's side, you'll notice that the dead pedal does indeed have 2 holes for it in the carpeting, but they don't line up to the correct holes in the body. Since there were 2 holes there, i used those anyway. Bang, the first holder was in. You could use bolts or something instead of the plastic brads if you wanted a more secure mount, but I didn't care. Next, I got the plastic piece of trim that protects the pedal from sticking on the carpet, and popped that in using the 2 plastic brads for that particular piece. I then flattened the carpet as best I could over the vents on the floor. Using a knife and my finger, felt under the carpeting for the 2 holes that attached the old carpet to the floor. Once I found 'em, I poked my knife through each in a star shape. Stuck the brads in next. Take the seatbelt, and work it through the notch for it in the carpet. As you're working on this project, you should be flattening the carpet out as often as possible. Once you have this done, start looking to line up the seat bolt holes from the carpet to the floor. Whenever you find one pretty much lined up, stick a bolt in there to hold it in place. Remember that mad rusty bolt from the seat, the one that goes through the transmission tunnel wall? Well, it's a pain in the ass, yet again, because you have to cut a hole for it. If you just cut a slit, it doesn't work real well, so cut a dime-sized hole in the carpeting, then stick the bolt in and give it a few turns. We'll worry about the trunk release lever and cover when we get the whole carpet secured. There is a metal box, with wires going in and out of it, right under the passenger seat (or where it would be). Now, the carpet isn't meant for this box, so I just kinda forced it over by caving in the bottom of the carpet upwards to allow for the box. If you're really motivated, you can make relief cuts in the carpet for the box, but my method works fine, since the seat's going over top of it anyway. Repeat the same steps as the driver's side(minus the pedal plastic stuff) for the passenger side. Now, it's time for the back.
http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~trifard/images/SLi/DIY/short.jpg
Procedure: Carpet modification
Alright, so the back doesn't fit. And the hole for the trunk and gas tank release doesn't look so well lined up. But trudge onward. There are better ways to do this, than the one I chose, I'm sure. I made cuts where the horizontal and vertical parts of the carpet by the tranny tunnel meet and where the carpet bent up toward the door, where it meets the seats. I then took the back of the original carpeting, and slid it in underneath. I then tacked it down using the 3 plastic brads that originally held it down, underneath where the rear seat mounts. From here, I trimmed the carpeting so it would rest flat in the floor pans on each side, and rounded the corners a little. The center of the carpeting, I could not get the top of the carpet,above the tranny tunnel, to lie flat. I had a piece of rubber mat lying around, and I cut it to fit over the tranny tunnel. For now, I used black corrugated household wire covering to border the STi carpeting where it meets the gray legacy carpeting. It looks alright, but I'm going to get a large piece of blue fabric to replace the gray carpet with. Then I'm going to get some red or pink vinyl string, and sew it to the STi carpeting. I really didn't think ahead, but probably should have just cut the carpet in the middle. There may be some wrinkles in the back carpeting, I solved that by sticking the floor foam padding from under the original carpet for the back. The fronts were pretty good, and my floor mats are huge, so they covered the real obvious wrinkles. I had tor trim around the trunk/fuel door release, because it was all bunched up. There was a 1" gap or so at the front. No biggie for me, because of the floor mats.