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Just looking for a little advice with the potential replacement of the carpet on my '66 Toronado. The stuff in the car is looking pretty rough and I'd like to remove it. The carpet replacement looks straightforward enough but it's the stuff underneath the carpet that I'm curious about. According to the assembly manual there is a "floor cover", a "deadener", and an "insulator" beneath the carpet. Seems like an awful lot of stuff under there! I'm sure the installed stuff is pretty ratty and needs to go. What's everyone putting underneath their carpet when they do a replacement? I don't need mine to be a concourse restoration here, just want to make it enjoyable to sit in and drive.
See my pics below that show the current configuration:
According to the 1966 Dealer Specs book, C60 and C61 are air conditioning options. What you have circled in blue would be for A/C-equipped cars. Does your car have air-conditioning? If so, you would have that layer.
If it were me, I would just put in a layer of some kind of insulation and then the carpet. I wouldn't go nuts on this.
In every car I've ever replaced carpeting on, the underlayment was always in reasonably good shape, so I just put the carpet back on top of that.
According to the 1966 Dealer Specs book, C60 and C61 are air conditioning options. What you have circled in blue would be for A/C-equipped cars. Does your car have air-conditioning? If so, you would have that layer.
If it were me, I would just put in a layer of some kind of insulation and then the carpet. I wouldn't go nuts on this.
In every car I've ever replaced carpeting on, the underlayment was always in reasonably good shape, so I just put the carpet back on top of that.
Yeah, mine has manual air conditioning. Thanks for the advice! Any suggestions on the type of insulation people like to use?
I’m more than late to this party, but can recommend Dynamat as the bottom layer, or similar aluminum backed butyl rubber. I also opted for their Dynaliner product as the second layer on my floor pans - stem to stern - meaning high up on the firewall all the way to the end of the trunk by the rear bumper. Overkill, but I like a quiet car. I did not use the Dynaliner in the trunk as I recall.
Couple of related items.
First up, when you get rid of the big noises, the little ones can begin to get under your skin. Squeaks, rattles and what not. Those can become their own projects over time.
Second, a good deal of road noise comes in through the doors and rear quarter panels. In 1966 GM insulated these parts with what amounted to tarpaper just to keep out moisture. By today’s standard, they were really only trying to keep out water, not really noise. In the 80’s I replaced the tarpaper with cut-to-fit heavy mil clear plastic and just taped it down.
Later on in the 90’s or ‘00’s, I used a product sold to me as Volara at a car show. I don’t know what it’s really called, but it’s closed cell white foam backed with aluminum and about 1/4” thick. I put one sheet cut to fit over each inner door skin and each rear quarter glued in with spray glue. Then where there are voids in the inner door skin or rear quarters, I cut some smaller pieces to fit the voids the glued those to the other sheet. Once you have the void pieces affixed to the overall sheet, you get what amounts to installation guides whenever you put the foam on & off like when you fool around with window glass, motors, door handles and what not.
I highly recommend closed cell foam for both water and noise insulation whatever product you might use. Cutting it to fit and glueing your own pieces is a pretty fun weekend project.
