broken arm rest fix

[EliteRaven]

Well i got tired of looking around for arm rests so one day I got a little creative. I have a 92 exe with manual windows and locks. all you have to do is remove the inner door plastic this is pretty easy to do its a bunch of clips and are cheap to replace if they do break. K now you have your door liner off bring it inside with ya cause if its winter where you are too your freezing your butt off by now. get out a piece of card board and place it on the area where the original arm rest was and trace the outline and be sure to mark where the front of the handle attached. this will be your stencil for your new arm rest. you will have to guestimate your handle I went with a 1.25 width ont eh handle just to make sure it was strong enough and made sur the curve of the inner handle was not too sharp. cut out your stencil and go find some 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch ply wood or MDF whatever you may have. I used 3/4 inch ply wood use your stencil and tranfer it to the wood cut it out and test fit it to the door trim you may have to do some triming and stuff to make it look right after your have it exactly as you want it trace a copy of that on to the wood again and cut your second arm rest! now comes the fun part we all like some cushion on our arm rest so I used a piece of carpet padding cut it to fit the top to the ply wood and then used some 3m spray adhesive to make it stay.
the covering I used some black fake leather nylon stuff that is used on seats and things and some small staples in a air stapler. this takes a little while to get the curves right and make it look ood so take your time.
Now your armrest is all apulstered! to put it on just get some screws and put it on fromt he inner part of the door liner! real easy just be careful of the length of the screwes so you dont poke your self int he arm when you are using the new rest. I will try to get some pics of my rest when I got outside tomorow. hope this helps some other folks!

Len

 

[Opera House]

Mine started cracking

and I took it off and brought it into work. We use a lot of epoxy and I would keep dumping the waste in there along with scrap plastic for filler. Bondo would probably work just as well. You just have to catch it before the crack develops too far.