Replaced door panel fabric with perforated leather to match Clazzio seat covers

[CTScott]

Yesterday Enviri and I spent the afternoon (and into the late evening) replacing our door panel fabric. I replaced the fabric on my 09 5 door with black perforated leather, of which I bought half of a cow hide off ebay for about $60 shipped. He replaced his 08 3 door fabric with black vinyl to match the outer portion of the Clazzio cover.

There are a couple of excellent DIYs here that we used as a reference. It took us far longer than we expected it to, due to two issues:

In my case, the rear doors of the 5 door are much more difficult as the plastic door trim is fused as one complete assembly. The fabric on front doors on the 3 and 5 door is only tucked on 1 of four sides. The fabric for the rear door of the 5 door is tucked on three of the four sides, requiring me to drill out (and later repair) the plastic bosses that are melted to fuse the door sections together.

In Enviri's case the vinyl, which he also purchased via ebay, was extremely stiff, making it a bear to tuck and to get it to properly conform to the contours of the door panel.

Here are some pictures of my completed work:

Front Door Panel:


Rear Door Panel:



Rear door panel construction - The white area is the part which is covered with the fabric. There were 11 plastic bosses that came up from the gray part, through holes in the white part, and then were melted to bond the two parts together. I drilled all of the side bonds and three of the bottom ones to allow me to get the OEM fabric off and to be able to mount and tuck the leather. To repair them I was able to use 3/4" long self-tapping washer head screws for 5 of them. The remainder were too short for screws, so I used Devcon High-Strength Plastic Welder to repair them.