Camaro Rebuild Journal

These were also a bit tired, so I decided to take them apart and rebuild them from scratch. I must apologise for the quality of some of the photos in the this section. The camera I usually use belongs to someone else, and the selfish bastard wanted to use their own camera on holiday. <sarcasm> I ask you, how rude is that? </sarcasm> ;)
So, these photos were taken with my Nokia 7650 phone. Hey, I can even call people on and stuff....<ahem>

To recondition the sun visors, I decided to take them apart. The visor is essentially composed of three bits, the outer vinyl skin and binding, the foam padding and finally the fibre-board former that has the metal work attached to it all.
So, start by gently cutting the thread that holds the outer binding to the rest of the visor. As you will find, there is a second thread that holds the visor skin together. Once the binding has been removed, cut the thread that holds the rest of the skin together. Make a note of how the vinyl is folded around the swivel joint that goes into the metal spine of the visor.

At this point, check over the binding and outer skin. If both are in good nick (mine were), you should be able to re-use them. If they are buggered, then you are going have to try and create a pattern from the remains. If you are re-using the skin, wash it in a mild water/detergent mix. This helps get rid of the old glue and (no doubt) deteriorated foam padding. Once you are happy with how clean it is, and it s dry, you can (if necessary) respray the vinyl. I only did this as the original visors were blue (yuck).
I then cleaned up the fibre-board body, and removed the metal swivel joint. As the metal parts were rusty, I treated them with Kurust, and gave them a light spray of clear lacquer. Once the lacquer had dried, I drew out, on cardboard, and template for the new foam padding. As the body of the visor is in two parts, make sure you have a little "wiggle" room to allow the triangular end section to move. It also makes it easier to sew the skin back together as well.
With cardboard pattern in hand, I bravely went shopping for foam. I purchased a couple of square metres of closed-cell foam, 3 mm in thickness from Point North. Once I had the foam, I then cut out 2 complete sets for each sun visor. To attach the foam to the visor body, I used spray-on contact adhesive. This stuff is evil, and I strongly suggest that you do this outside (can't get more ventilated than the big blue room). Once the foam has stuck to the board, I then beveled the edges of the foam to (hopefully) give a nicer appearance of the finished article.
Right, by now, I have every thing ready to go, ooh, I forgot to mention, I cleaned up the chrome parts with Autosol just o give a bit of sheen.
Now I have everything ready to go. Put the swivel joint back into the metal receiver, and wrap the vinyl skin around the visor body. Guess what? Start sewing. You need a butch thread for this, not cotton, as that will rot over time. I used a bonded polyester thread and two needles to stitch the skin on. Once the skin was on, I then repeated the process for the the binding, et voila! A completed visor.