How to paint ' headliners ' etc,.....

[Speedfreak]

Hi,

I'm working on '70 1/2 AMT  Camaro Z28 and have been thinking about what I'm going to do for the interior head- liner and inside of pillars/posts. Normally I just hand paint my interiors but seems there's got to be a way with proper masking to spray them. I'm using a medium dk. blue for the body with white interior and stripes (ya, right, I couldn't have chosen an easier color combo).  Any tips/ideas for accomplishing this will be appreciated, thanks.

[Snake45]

Mask off the windows on the outside (before painting the exterior color), shoot your white on the inside, then mask off the inside white, clean up any overspray on the outer body, and proceed as usual. 

For white headliners, I've also been known to use 3M white vinyl tape, run side-to-side so the seams look like seams in a fabric headliner. 

[TomZ]

When I prime a car with Tamiya white primer I also prime the interior. Then I mask off the headliner when I paint the car. It looks great to me. Then again, my standard is "less than perfect."

 

[Speedfreak]

Thanks you guys, similar ideas to what I've had, I will now proceed with project.

[89AKurt]

My two cents.  I've been using construction paper, there are lots of cool colors and even textures to use.  I wet the paper so it conforms to the curves.  And it covers ejection pin marks.

[Speedfreak]

Cool. Question(s); What do you use to glue it down? And how does it hold in place (and it's shape) after it dries?

[rsxse240]

This is a very multi-layer question.

 

Just painting a headliner, box stock build, I like Snake's plan.

 

Covering mold imperfections and such, 89AKurt's plan would work well with any number of materials.

 

I have used both of these examples and had great success.  But there's no limit to how detailed you can get.  I have used sheet styrene to build up interior details on a, b, and c pillars to give depth and dimension and used masking tape for headliner.  I've used Bondo to fill in spaces to smooth out the inner roof.  

 

The thing is to find a 1:1 reference photo of what you wish to replicate, then through trial and error, asking for suggestions, and brainstorming, come up with a plan to achieve your goal.

 

You see in this picture, I had a full bucket type "glass".  I temporarily installed and scribed the door window opening to the bucket, carefully scribed out the door glass leaving the bucket minus the door glass to represent the interior trim plastics. I then shaped and polished things accordingly.  I then used masking tape to cover the square hole in the headliner, did some creative masking and painting to create a very believable headliner and inner roof.  Then I thinned and polished the door glass and installed them to be halfway down.  All because I wanted to hang the seatbelts where they belong.  Lol 

 

Here's the finished product.  See how well the effort payed off?  Oh, no, you can't see it, but it does look very good, take my word.   Hahaha

[Tom Geiger]

A lot of headliners today are hard cardboard.  So I make some of them from a ribbed cardstock, an old stack of business cards I have been working off. I generally work from the center, with a card folded in half so I get symmetry.  Then I trace it onto the final flat card to cut.  I save the templates in my decal box.  This is the  Model King AMT 1979 Ford kit.  I use white glue to glue it in place.

 

Edited January 5, 2019 by Tom Geiger