Repairing rear interior wheel well covers

Ultimately I think I will have them covered with vinyl, but that's down the road. Right now I just want them to look decent and prevent them from getting worse.

I uncovered the passenger side this evening. It's not perfect, but it's much better than it was. I took a couple of photos, but the light wasn't great.

 

So, with the driver's side turning out decent I'm now planning to tackle the passenger's side.

 

Wow! Looks good! Nice little band aid. You took 10 years off those cracks. Maybe I should JB weld my wife’s face?

 

Thanks Grizz.

 

It looks pretty good, the hard part when you decide to recover will be cutting out the moulded ribbing without having it crumble in your hands, that is if you want to try to save it to glue on to new vinyl.

Hickey off body filler, ala Cheech & Chong.

 

Thanks Kev. For now I'm trying to keep things from getting worse and by default make it look better than it does now. I'm sure that care will have to be taken when it comes to recovering them with vinyl, but I'll burn that bridge when I get there.

 

Great job OrtmannJ ! For plastic that is closing in on 60 years you did a fantastic save.

 

Thanks annap.

 

I finally got around to working on the passenger's side. We had a couple of warm days, which were perfect for moving the old plastic around and getting it into place. There are way more cracks and such on the passenger's side, so I decided to do it in two phases.



Not as good as the other side, but better than it was before:

 

Have you thought about laying a piece of vinyl face down on the panel to protect the grain then using an iron to heat it and reshape it to the metal underneath.

 

No I hadn't thought of that. Unfortunately the entire piece "floats" over the metal, so it's not a snug fit. This makes everything that much more complicated.

 

I worked on the interior some more yesterday, since it was another beautiful warm day. I attempted to improve what I did last time, as well as work on what I didn't get to last time.



I left everything this way over night. I'll be interested to see how it looks when I get home this evening.

 

Well, it’s been three years since the last time I updated this thread. The repairs I made were a good fix, but unfortunately it was only temporary. I have been on the search for replacement panels and last year I got a message from someone on one of the Mopar forums that he had a set available. And they were blue. What are the odds? Oh, and he lived in the same state as me too!

I was able to make a trip over to his place and I bought the interior panels, a stainless glove box door cover and an intake. It was quite the fruitful trip.

Here are the panels after they were refurbished


I’m looking forward to getting them in there.

 

A great find and even down to the correct color. Looking forward to seeing before and after pictures once they are installed.

 

Off to have them installed