Submitted by Voodoosoup
1. Grab your favorite beverage
2. Drink favorite beverage
3. See steps 1 and 2 :D

This took me about 6 hours to complete, plan on more if you've never had your door panels off and have no experience upholstering things.

First thing you need to do is remove one of your door panels.
I won't cover how to do that here, it's already posted on the site I believe.

1. Grab some tools

I used a dremel with the standard cut-off discs, a hot glue gun with all-purpose high-temp glue sticks, various screwdrivers, a utility knife, screws and washers. Some eye protection would also be a good idea. (lots of hot flying plastic and adhesive)


Sitting down with the door panel in your lap backside up

You need to pry the 2 staples out of the sound deadening material (grey with multi-color fibers) that hold it to the area you'll be working in near the top of the door panel.

Next you need to carfully take out the big white piece of foam that is glued to the door panel. Find a place to get your fingers under it and gently pry it up until it comes out.
You now should have somthing that looks like this


Next you need to grind down or cut off the tops of the plastic rivets that hold the piece to the door panel. This is where I used the dremel tool.
You need to work slowly and carefully and try to avoid cutting through the piece of door panel that we are removing the small piece from


The ones you want to remove first are the inner row that go all the way around the panel mine were silghtly off-white/yellowed.

Be careful if some of the glue from the white foam is covering some of the rivets. If this is heated up by the dremel it starts to spatter and it doesn't feel good when it hits your skin.

If you start in one of the upper corners you can pry the panel easier to start breaking it free of the rest of the door panel.

After you have the panel broken free your door panel will look like this


now would be a good time to clean up the wholes where the panel was attached and also clean up the edges of the posts on the back of the piece wou'll be upholstering so that it easily fits back into the holes in the door panel.

The piece you removed will look like this

If you are going to be using a thick material (like vinyl etc) I would remove the original fabric that is covering the panel. I didn't do this and I had a hard time getting the pieces back together.

Plug your glue gun in to let it warm up.

One you have the covering off lay the panel, backside down on the backside of the fabric that you will be using. Trace around it with a pen or sharpie or fabric pencil/marker. Cut out the fabric with scissors leaving at least 1" past the outline that you just drew. It will be easiest to cut your pieces out with one straight edge for upholstering purposes.

Lay your fabric face down on a clean work surface and lay your panel face down on top of the fabric.

Starting with the straight edge put some glue between the middle two rivets on the plastic panel wrap your fabric around the edge and line it up with the raised plastic on the panel.



Cotinue glueing until you have the fabric glued to the last rivets before the corner.

Turn the panel around so that the edge you just glued is facing you.
Put some glue on the middle of the curved side the panel and stetch the material around the piece pulling it taught and pressing it firmly into your glue.


Continue glueing until you reach the last rivet on the curved side.
Be careful when doing the round part because the fabric will bunch and you don't want it to bunch near any of the rivets. Or the panel will not sit flush when you put it back on.

Now would be a good time to trim away any fabric that is hanging past the little ridge where it is glued down.

Ok you have to be carefulk when doing the corners becuse it can be a little tricky to get it to laydown right.

With the straight edge facing you grab the fabric on both sides of the corner with your left thumb and forefinger pulling the fabric up and back towards the middle of the panel. Carefully cut below your fingers with scissors. The trick is to leave just enought material to cover the corner and butt the edges of the fabric to gether on the backside. You might have to trim it a couple of times to get it right. At this point yuo can glue down the rest of the fabric up to the corners. I put a drop of glue on the outer part of the corner to hold the fabric down then glue the two pieces down at the corner butted together and pulled tight.


Trim away any excess fabric and cut out around the rivet posts if you need to. And if you did everything right you should have something like this


Put the door panel back in your lap and test fit your newly upholstered piece. If you removed the old fabric I think it will fit back in without removing and additional rivet tops.

If you can't get the curved edge to line up you will have to remove the blue rivet tops around the curved edge leaving the top corners ones on both sides.


These should come apart easier than the one's that held the panel in.
Once you have all of the blueish rivet tops remove you should be able to fully seat the curved side of the reupholstered panel back into the door panel. Screw the new panel together in a couple of spots on the straight edge (I found I couldnlt put screws in all of these holes because there just wasn't enough plastic for th escrew to bite into. Using your hot glue glue one of the corners on the stright edge down. You will probably have to hold these pieces together (5-10min) until the glue sets up enough to hold.
Continue gluing across the straight edge until you have glue in all of the holes. Once this has set up a little loosen the screws a turn or so so that the curved side of the panel pulls up through the holes in the back of the door panel. Put glue in all of these wholes and hold the panel until these set up. You should now be able to put screws in all of the blue holes to pull everything down tight. Also tighten any of the screw all the way down on the straight edge of the panel.


Glue the white foam back into place. I would test fit it first just so you know how it goes in. There are two posts that it fits over.


Remove it and put some hot glue over the area where it was glued before.
And stick the foam back onto the door panel.

You also need to glue the thick grey material back down where it was stapled to the door panel.


Turn your door panel around and admire your newly updated work of art!!!!


Discalimer: Not responsible for any severe hot glue burns or the accidental removal of any appendages with the Dremel tool.
No animals were harmed in the making of this how-to. :D

this makes me wish i had a shop dedicated to my alero, as my garage :lol:

bumpin it up so i can find it while i do this :)

I have been lurking around the forum awhile w/o posting so I guess now is a good time. I know i'm bringing up an old post but I just thought some people would like to see what this looks like in black if they decide to do it. The only thing I did different is pull the cloth piece of before gluing the new piece down.

THREAD JESUS! Its almost 5 years old :lol: o well
but it does look good, bet it really stand out with a black car.

Looks great. (this kinda jesus'ing i'll stand for) excellent addition.

Thanks guys, it does really go good with a black car.

what kinda fabric did you use? can't tell if its leather or vinyl...

and how did you fix it down? staples/hot glue/spray glue?

I had some black vinyl laying around from awhile ago so I decided to put it to good use. I used hot glue and used the same technique as Molson by starting on the straight edge and working my way around.

i want to do this right now :)

Could this be done with the existing material (leather in my case)? Mine are getting a bit rippled and it would be great to have nice and smooth again.

Wow, i wish i would have seen this when i first got my alero. I would have definately gone this rout instead of paint. Great job.
It looks pro.

I'll be doing it within the next week or so when I repaint my interior, add door LED's, and put in some new 4x6's