Interior and Upholstery Interior Panel Rehab

Now that I've got my '75 Mustang II Ghia's powertrain sorted out, cooling system up to the task, exhaust system quieted down, EFI installed, my attention turned to ditching the vinyl top, which meant getting rid of the opera windows and their plastic filler panels and installing full-size coupe quarter windows. I got started on that, and realized that I wasn't just going to need to clean and repair my rear interior panels, they were going to have to be replaced with the standard, non-Ghia, parts.

After searching all of the local salvage yards, watching Ebay like a hawk, talking to the nice people at Desert Valley Auto Parts (They have several IIs in inventory), throwing classified listings out on several Mustang sites, and talking to the few II people I know in person, I came up dry. I finally found a set via Phil's Mustang II specialty shop, and while they're in pretty good shape, they were filthy, and the wrong color.

This thread is going to show how I'm going to fix both of those problems, as well as a few minor cosmetic blemishes in the plastic.



Here, you can see what I'm starting with. Like I said, they're in pretty good shape, as you can see here on the passenger side panel, but they're a bit grimy.


To clean them, I started off with a rinse with warm water, followed by some scrubbing with a terry cloth towel, warm water, and Palmolive dish soap. This got the majority of it loose pretty quickly, but there's some stubborn stuff that just wouldn't come off, as you can see here on the driver side panel.


The passenger side panel's dirt was more stubborn, here I am rinsing the back side of it again to see if a little water pressure from the "massage" setting won't knock some more of it loose. (One of the benefits of being single is you can use your bathtub for things like this!)


After some more time scrubbing and rinsing, we have a pretty clean panel. I'm going to do some detail cleaning later, and I'll update the thread when that's done, not to mention the rest of the steps involved.