.  I had a whole mess of this crushed penne laying around in my garage from using it to do my interior 4 years ago.  With Cinco coming up, my husband and I decided I need an updated look in my car so I'm going to glass most of the interior and I wanted to put some coach fabric throughout.  Gonna take some time, so we tried to get the trunk done first, and I'll build the actual interior later.

So here is what I got done with the help of chad, his wife, (couple club members) and my husband...we put some long nights in but it looks awesome. Hope you enjoy....





Couple things we needed to accomplish......

-I picked up a couple 7 inch monitors so I needed to throw that in the trunk.

-I built a huge vented ported enclosure, but I didn't want to see it.

-Needed to utilize some coach fabric in the trunk.

-Next year I will be airbagging her car so, I need to keep room in the trunk.

-needs to be removable

-get it done by Cinco!


Okay here is a pic of the car its gonna go in...Its a 95 dodge avenger.....

This was at the Cinco de Mayo car show.... so the car made it, lets see if the trunk did





first day....here is what her trunk used to look like....the penne looks like ass, my speaker box isn't covered....I had a special cover made for it that just slipped on for shows....but the penne just looks cheap in my trunk.



Next up....we cut out the pieces to box the trunk off.  The main piece across the back could only be so big or else it wouldn't fit so I cut it the biggest I possibly could and made those 2 little pillars on either side to fill the gap...but I'll utilize them to give the trunk a little shape to it.



we cut the frames out for the two monitors and routed them all to help the piece flow when stretching the material.  made a couple measurements to center them.



At first while I was at Home Depot...Joe (my husband) saw this backstrap excrement (kind of like that excrement you get with your deck to screw it to your firewall)  He thought it would be kind of sweet to just bend all my angles and screw it down.



But it really lacked sturdiness and getting the bends to mirror each other sucked ass.  It gives a good pic of where the screens will be....notice they are a little high in the trunk. couple reasons....room for the tank when we do air next spring and so if I want to roll with the trunk popped you can see the screens.


Anyway, we went with the traditional way...we just hot glued some wooden dowels to raise the frame for the screen.  I measured all the dowels to a given length and cut them so there wouldn't be any problems with symmetry (sp)



heres a couple pics with the screens...as you see the boards are just pressure fit in. we used 1/2" MDF





Next...the dodge avenger has a wierd curve in the dash area.  I was getting an in dash and didn’t want to deal with the screen not being able to go back a little so that I could view it, so we made raised the dash.


here it is test fitted with some penne stretched over it.  its basically another 1/2" MDF wooden frame but alot of routing with a couple different bits to get it to sit flush with the curves of the existing dash piece. and then hot glued in place.

sorry its not rotated....



this is tricky to explain but you can see I put some black "X's" to show which pieces I installed.  this was so I could make a seem between the side pieces and the main piece...You'll see what it does when I stretch fabric later.



Now I started strectchin the crushed penne...its 100% polyester just like fleece.  I put it on backwards though...On the two side pieces you will see that its penne....

I only put 4 staples down the middle to bring out the curves otherwise everything was secured using staples on the back of the piece.



heres a little test fitting....Just trying to make sure the thickness of the material wasn't effecting the pressure fit of the board.

but excrement...we threw the screens in to make me feel like I made some progress.



Here are the side pieces with the penne stretched over them....we used a shitload of staples to make that nice seem on top and really bring out that curve.  you can kind of see where that piece with the black "X" I posted a few pics back...makes a seem between the two pieces.







Here we are getting ready to glass...I hot glued where the fabric and the frames for the screens go to hold it in place.



Here we are all glassed up......and my husband is crossin his fingers that this penne excrement works.....WELL IT DOESN'T!  unlike fleece which stays nice and rigid while you glass....this excrement lost its shape faster than a chick after giving birth.....and it was flimsy as hell



In the meantime...we started on her trunk lid.  Joe took a few measurements and kind of free handed the curves and got a nice fit.....we used 1/4" MDF cause its flexible.

Once joe could mount it to the trunk lid, he could trace the curve from the back of the trunk lid to get the shape I needed.





Got my little table covered with a couple trash bags so I could keep the coach material from getting dirty.  I thought making the trim rings out of coach would be kind of slick...nothing amazing but a nice touch



I cut some squares out and used 3M's super 90 spray adhesive....gotta support the local business



you can kind of see the "C's" from the coach...was hard to get with the camera but you can see em in the day light.



Got some 1/2 foam and traced out the trunk lid to give my coach fabric a little body to it.



I also used Super 90 to glue the two pieces together....just make sure to give em' plenty of time to tack up.



I then used more spay adhesive to glue the fabric down.....I bought some white screw caps to cover the screw heads.



Now back to this penne that proved to be one big fucking head ache after another

after seeing the main piece be so flimsey after Joe glassed the penne I went out and got some chop mat to put down while we glassed the other pieces....Joe always cut my chop mat in strips to cut down on the chance for bubbles

Joe glassed the penne and added chop mat in the same step...you gotta work fast and make sure to saturate all the way through



You can see how much the penne looses its shape once the heated reaction of the resin and the material take place....on the right side you can see that ugle curling....equals lots of body filler 



I went back and sanded the main piece so Joe could apply chop mat to it...This ended up being a good idea anyway because we wouldn't have to worry bout sanding through the thin material while applying filler later.

once again, I use strips of chop mat and SATURATE!, Snapped a couple of these while my husband glassed it.



Here I am sanding down the dash piece to prep it for body filler...



the dash piece was tough cause it has so many small details so we went pretty liberal with the filler knowing we would sand a shitload down.



Here I am laying down some body filler on the main piece.





There is my husband and chad sanding down some of the pieces



There is MAVERICK himself chad puttin in work later that night on a keg of champaigne (the high life).....it was his bday bonanza



back to the headache....here is 1 coat of body filler.....1 of many  you can see how many high spots I ended up with....what a disaster...stick to fleece EVEN IF YOU HAVE PENNE LAYING AROUND



Here is after I think 3 of 4 layers of body filler....we just had to keep building this excrement up cause it collapsed from the resin.....checking our gaps with the seams



Chad brought up a good point and so a little side project I did was make little beauty rings for the gaps where the trunk lid bars are....





Here you can see how thrilled Joe is....this is now GALLON number 2 of body filler.




Here we test fit the dash piece....Only needed 2 coats of body filler but we had to build up a couple tiny spots.



final fitment....you can see all the layers of body filler, fucking piece looks like a cheetah with all the spots on it.....paid off though starting to get extremely smooth and even



little view of the curve and checking our seams
you can see her "dated" crushed penne interior....



last pic before primer....



chad putting down first bit of primer....



I went ahead and put a coat of primer on……perfect paint booth outfit



started to feel good, but when we layed the primer we found a couple low spots....So we went back and layed some glaze down to build up those spots....



coming down the stretch....after filling any pin holes with glaze and building up the couple low spots.....last layer of primer.....things are starting to look promising.





time for paint....we went with a PPG its an off white that we had mixed since the coach fabric wasn't a bright white.




couple interior pieces that had to get done....





FINALLY, after some wet sanding and buffing were there....matches the fabric pretty damn good too!  you can see I was test fitting those little beauty rings done in coach fabric.....got the TVs fired up.







here are the dash pieces.....I bought a Jenson flip out to run the monitors....I do bass competitions so we have a nice alpine deck that we can swap in and out in 10 minutes but I'm kind of impressed with this Jenson...My husband prefers the kenwood flip out but for what I paid for it, he seemed pretty impressed.



So to answer the question....yes the trunk made it to cinco....I also made a piece for the trunk floor very similar to how I did the trunk lid....It is made of 1/4" MDF and 1/2" foam and then covered in black coach fabric to match the trim rings.






hope you enjoy....huge thanks to chad and his wife for puttin in some long ass nights....I'll try to keep the build up alive, next week or so I'll probably start her back seat area....its already been removed and has amps flush mounted but were gonna give it an updated look.

HOLY CRAP.. Thats awesome

very neat job, everything looks great.   i like the colors too, white goes awesome with dark purple IMO

looks good....


but i do have to point out that all that work is good but your cupholder still does not work

unfortunately I never had all the pieces for it.  Hasn't worked since the day I bought it 


besides, the only thing I would use that cup holder for is beer.....and thats illegal

Nice work, very clean 

thats cool, cup holders are overrated anyway

quality work,but i need to know , and this always bothered me with pimp my ride and other shows..... why put tv's in the trunk? do you sit behind the car and watch tv? maybe it scores points for car shows, but if they ever judged them with functionality in mind then it would never happen.... explain?