Sun Visor Recovering..., WATCH THIS SPACE! Options

[dagdal1967]

There is a place very near my house, in a little business park that does all types of upholstery. I've driven by it every day for the past few weeks, and today I was off of work early so I decided to stop by and see what he could do about my warped, and nasty sun-visors.

I pulled in and asked him if he was able to do sun visors. He wanted to know what they were on and what they needed to look like, so we went outside and I introduced him to Das Weibchen. After a couple minutes of (very merited) admiration of my car, he looked at the sun visors.

He took me inside to show me what he had done with other visors, and said that he could recondition them with a firm/hard board inside and make them look better than new.

After looking at his work (top quality on the items he showed me), I braced myself and asked the price.

$25.00 per visor! To me that sounded like an EXCELLENT deal, so I said YUP, and he immediately took the visors off, took my details and said they would be ready by next Tuesday.

As I know that this has been discussed by a number of people, I though I'd post and let people know...

I'll post some pictures (both before installation and after) of how they turned out.

Doug

[IronHillRestorations]

I did some extensive research on redoing visors about ten years ago. I looked at the hard insert approach and after some further research and soliciting some expert opinions, the hard board insert is a bad idea. That hard board has the potential of scalping you!!

There is a reason the factory visors have a (fairly soft) wire frame with no hard inner core. Next time you are in your 914 see how close those things are to your face! Granted we should all be wearing seat belts now, but product liability is a big issue these days and you could be buying trouble by selling a product with the potential for serious personal injury. At least that was the "expert opinion" that I got.

I investegated the OEM style route, and the only way to do that was to use, used cores and get tooling to heat seal the perimeter, at a cost in the $3000 range. An exact replica of the vinyl isn't available. I found one that was close in grain, but too shiney of a finish. I found one with the right finish but the grain wasn't right.

After considering all the options and the "thrifty nature" of 914'ers, I didn't figure the tooling expense would ever be recovered. How many 914'ers do you know that would pay $80-$100 for recovered sun visors?

I found that if you are very careful you can use an exacto knife and slit the visor along the forward seam and remove the wire core and the foam. You can then clean up the wire, cut new foam, and carefully weld the seam back with crazy glue. It takes time and patience, but it can be done.

In the course of doing this exercise I did purchase a set of visors, brand new from Porsche. At a price of around $400 for the set!!! They don't have a mirror, and the grain is not close the original visors!

YMMV