cfair

It was time to replace the 50 year old fabric in the rear window channels of my front doors. My door rear window channels were nicely polished in certain places.

When I did my convertible, all I had around was cotton fabric, which has worked fine for a few years, but with the Starfire I wanted to see if I could do something a little better. I settled on very wide velcro, the fuzzy side.

First you have to get the channel cleaned out of the old stuff. I found that 3M's special adhesive remover worked just great. Except it runs all over the place. To work, it really needs to set for a while to solve/break down the old fabric adhesive. I wound up shoving paper towels into the channel and soak the towels with the 3M adhesive remover. Of course I hit on this after I'd made a good smelly VOC mess on my workbench.


A good way to remove old rear window channel insulation. Use in a ventilated area.

Restoration / reproduction fabric exists, but it's very thin. For replacement I used 2" wide black velcro with a sticky back, using only the fuzzy side to replace the old fabric. It turns out the '66 big car rear U channels are substantially deeper or wider than 2". Good thing I got lots of velcro. I'm hoping velcro will wear longer & create just enough isolation without binding the glass or slider in the channel.

Windows need to slide on a consistent surface through their up/down travel so the replacement liner needs to lie flat.

I used one length of velcro formed into a U shape to line the bottom of the U (aka the rear of the channel). I was pretty sure it would be hard to use the adhesive backing of the velcro getting to sit flat, so I glued these U shapes down with 3M interior spray glue. Then I had a few minutes to slide the velcro U around and get it to sit roughly evenly in the channel.

2" isn't deep enough to really isolate the glass from the metal side walls which might scratch it. I took another length of fuzzy velcro and X-acto sliced it in to 2 X 1" wide lengths to line the sides of the U channel. To install these parts I peeled back about 1" and set it as squarely as possible against the velcro U channel to avoid binding. Then I slowly worked my way down the channel nudging the sticky back velcro into just the right line to match the U that was already there.

It probably would have been better to get much wider velcro, like maybe 4" wide, but this worked. I like the idea that I didn't have to glue the whole thing exactly perfect on the first go.That almost never works for me.

Oh -- when you get this deep into it, it can help with adjusting to clean up all the threads on the special long window nuts, in my car they're 1/4-20.

Not a real fun job, but once you get this deep in, you might as well get it as good as you can.

Cheers
Chris