Wrinkly doors cards - production change
 

I'm just rebuilding the car after painting and had a wrinkly door car from the donor door, my originals are not wrinkly atall so I thought I'd investigate. I also notice a rather ratty speaker install in my car, but a much better one in the donor.

My car: 95 940 2.3 SE turbo estate
Donor: 96 940 something lower spec with manual uncoloured mirrors

It seems the later car has the vinyl cover of the door car clamped up at the edge with a metal crimp over the top. The metal crimp is in 3 sections, leaving stress gaps where the wrinkles occur that pull away from the edge. If they had been continuous or long enough to butt together the wrinkles may not have occured.

In my earlier car the vinyl is wrapped and glued all the way around the outside of this continuous metal crimp with gaps only on the underside for the door retention clips. Clearly the production changed has caused the wrinkly problem.

The speakers they seem to have run out of the proper rivets in 95 and restorted to wider one pushing in from the backside and using only 2 per speaker instead of 4. Volvo need to goto cost reduction school, this is not the way to cost reduce a high end luxury car! Its a disgrace if they did this deliberately, and even worse if they allowed production to continue like this because the proper parts were not available.

I heard it was a change of glue around 95-96. On my 96 940 the door cards were a mess but on the two later cars I broke which were both 98's the cards were fine.

All the speakers on my 96 car were fitted with four rivets as I drilled them out when fitting new speakers

I'm guessing that x2 rivet job must have been a repair, it looks like the speaker has witness marks on it from the missing 2 rivets.

Well in this case it was a change of construction, but I imagine they changed back if they detected the problem. If problems had occured within the 20yr life expectation of the car there would be a case for some sort of compensation. but only against the life lost from the item. Still I think many did fail with 20yrs.

Anyway I fancied upgrading my speakers too, what ones did you fit? The hole pattern is irregular and the speakers circumference flattened at the top and bottom so the grills fit.

I just fitted the newer Volvo speakers from the 98 car. Easy enough to fit modern ones but you will need adapter plates

My '93 car has a wrinkly passenger door car, end nearest the B pillar around the door button. Only minor compared to some examples I've seen. Drivers door is fine.

Door cards are immaculate in my 1997 940, I did fit two rear ones from a 98 940 I broke as the 97 rear ones were slightly starting to wrinkle.

Interesting, does it have the metal crimp with the gaps in it? Just pull the rubber up near the wrinkle to check.

Maybe 2 different suppliers or trials of a better solution, using up stock or something. Hard to know which came first.

Oddly, my experience is the opposite...the door cards in my '96 SE are minty, whereas the cards in my '95 GLE have significant wrinkling.

Has anyone tried/succeeded in repairing wrinkly card tops? My '95 is a rolling restoration project and, although the interior is generally very good for a 280k mile car, I'd really like to fix the crocked door cards at some point.