Installing Sound and Heat Insulation

Insulation is an important part to any car. Without insulation, a simple rainstorm can sound like a raging thunderstorm or the heat from the exhaust underneath your car can make it actually bake inside. And having rode in a few cars without insulation, you know it. When most cars were made, they were just spraying a heavy coat of tar for that insulation. And then they would usually, in the inside, they would put either a jute mat or some hardboard mat. So problems with these natural fiber mats is they acquire a smell over the years. And we all know that smell, that old car smell. And you don't wanna finish your restoration and have your car smell like an old car. So it's important to strip out the old sound deadening materials in there and replace them with something new. Old materials can start to lose their adhesion between the steel and the material itself and moisture can get in there and it can help to promote rot and everything else. Best thing to do is go in there and strip it out. Usually I'll use a heat gun or in some cases, even a propane torch just to soften it up and pull all that old material out, scrape it all down, sand it smooth, prime and paint. Now you've got a good clean surface to attach a new sound and heat insulation layer to. Product I love is the Dynamat product. It's a butyl rubber attached to a foil backing. The foil reflects the heat back and the butyl rubber will actually absorb sounds. The butyl rubber itself remains kind of sticky and kind of gooey and in time will actually seal into the little cracks and in surfaces in your floorboards. The downside of that is it will actually ooze out into bottoms of your carpets, and then can actually, I've seen this stuff actually drip down into like headliner material. So once we get this installed, we'll go back and we'll tape the edges so we've got a good clean sealed surface for the Dynamat. And this is a great product. Addition to this, Dynamat makes a number of other products to help reduce the noise and the heat. One product they make is called Dynapad. The Dynapad is a sandwiched foam and heavy rubber pad that's best to put on the floorboards, over where the exhaust or your muffler and exhaust systems are because those generate heat and radiate heat up into the body itself. Another product they make to help reduce sound is Dynaliner. The Dynaliner comes in different thicknesses depending on where you plan to use it. The half inch works good for floorboards. Quarter inch works good for the sides and all around. And then the eighth inch on your doors. You normally put this behind the door panels themselves to help reduce the sound coming through. So with that, we're gonna start our installation on our 57 DeSoto project. Installation of the Dynamat material is pretty straight forward. What we'll do is we'll dry fit the large pieces, make sure that they're fitting in the location we wanna put them, to matter of then peeling off the protective backing and sticking them in place. Cutting the Dynamat is fairly easy. It cuts easily with regular scissors. A thing to keep in mind, as you trim and fit all these pieces together, you're gonna end up with a lot of little scraps and little pieces. Don't leave them laying all around. From experience, they'll end up in your back hall, they'll end up in the living room, they'll end up on the dog's paws. This stuff is sticky. So take care to make sure you account for all your little scraps you cut. Then they won't end up all over the place. Once we get the piece fit to the position it's going to be all trimmed and fit, we'll peel the backing, stick it in place, and then roll it out to make sure we have good adhesion. This car has already been sandblasted and primed and painted. So we already have a good surface to attach it to. With that, we'll get started. Gary will be assisting me here. He'll be fitting the edges of the Dynamat material around the edges of the car, where we have metal overlap. And if you want, if you listen now, it sounds like a big tin can. And you'll hear again after we get this material up, how big of a difference this really makes. The material is fairly solid feeling and it comes in a big sheet, but as soon as you release the backing paper, it becomes a lot more flimsy and a little bit more difficult to deal with. And that's where an extra set of hands really comes in handy, especially on the ceiling. Gary's peeled back the areas toward the front edge of this, because it goes into a sandwiched area here. Now that we got it kind of in position around the edges, Gary will begin by rolling it from the edges and then working out into the rest of the shield. A good rubber faced roller works good for getting a good bond between the butyl rubber and the actual metal surface of the roof. You wanna make sure you have a good bond, especially on the roof, because you don't want this falling down after the headliner's all in place. That should fit. And we can't really get the roller in under the lip so he's using a pry bar or pry tool to actually press it down. To get good adhesion in the gaps around the surface. There we go. The first roll is in, we're ready for the second one. All right, that's good. Peeling back as much paper as we need to get the edges of the material to adhere without exposing too much at any one point, so we don't get it positioned in the wrong place. Great. Okay. Now we're ready to move further to the back. We'll get situated back there and also take an opportunity to get all the little scraps that we've cut and trimmed off. Get those out of the car. Once again, you can pick them up on your clothing, and your elbows, on your feet, and they will be everywhere. Now that we've got the front of that roof done, we're gonna start at the very back edge. In the very back edge of this car, we have a couple of brackets that hold the headliner bows. We wanna make sure we get the Dynamat installed underneath those so they don't interfere with actually installing the headliner later. We've got a good fit all the way to there. Using a roller now to kind of press it against the other sheet and we'll know exactly where the one sheet ends and the sheet starts. So we have a pattern to trim it by. For the final step of our installation process, we taped the seams of the Dynamat with... You know, it's just gorilla tape. It's a strong adhesive, it's gonna bond to the Dynamat real well and it'll keep any of that butyl rubber from seeping out between the seams. The great thing about this project is it provides a sound insulation that you'll actually feel when you're in the car. And better than that, it's something you can hear. You can tell the difference right there, that it's no longer gonna sound like a tin can when you're going down the road and it's gonna have that solid feel that you're looking for. So it pays off in a lot of ways.