Interior work on the d40 Nissan Navara

My work truck has seen some rather heavy use - which is what these vehicles are really intended for anyway. While the truck has been nicely maintained on the mechanical side, the same cannot be said for its interior. It was really dirty, smelly and fabrics destroyed in some parts, like the driver's seat bolsters.

There was also quite a bit of water in the footwell after a rainy day. Which prompts action. Really the only way to ensure you can get all of the water out inside a car or truck is to remove the carpet. Otherwise, pools of water will remain under the thick padding that carpets usually have.

The "after" pic.

Fortunately, the Navara is quite easy to tear down. Front seats are held with four bolts, rear seats being the same. Seat belt bottom mounts need to be removed, and the rest is really just tearing down the console, door trims and other plastic. The dashboard itself can remain, only the bottom parts such as the glove box need to come out.

Most interior parts come out in big chunks so there's not so much to remove. I try to put screws back in their retaining holes to help remember what goes where.

Once the interior is removed and both carpet pieces pulled out, I left a construction heater blowing hot air into the truck. This was to remove moisture in the foam and noise padding glued inside.

Once the carpet was removed, it was easy to clean. I washed it twice, with disinfectant and with regular car carpet wash, and then pressure washed it with water. It took a few days for the carpet to clean, but it turned out quite nice. You cannot get replacement carpets very easily over here and an OEM one is crazy expensive.

The leak itself took a while to locate, but by hosing water over the vehicle I was finally able to find that the rear glass seal was leaking, probably in multiple places. A quick googling showed this was not entirely uncommon with the Navara and Frontier. A proper way to fix this would have been removing the glass and installing a new glue on the inside, but the cheap solution was to tape the outsides of the seams and shoot the seam full of Sika seam sealer that I had left from another project.

Once the seats were out, it was fairly easy to fit the new seat covers I bought off ebay. They fit fairly well, as seen in the first photo. Installation is a bit of a hassle, but with the seats out, it is not that bad. Really only problem with the set is the front passenger seat if you have the option of the fold down table type seat (below), as the cover does not fit the mechanisms. By cutting the cover in a few places and hacking some extra zipties it stays in place, but the seat folding mechanism will not work anymore.