If you’ve read any car enthusiast magazine in the last decade, you know about Dynamat and you’ve seen one or two or a dozen tech stories on how to install it. The company has some good PR folk, first popularizing it among the bass-thumping crowd, then pitching it to the rest of us car nuts. Doesn’t hurt that ol’ Chip Foose has lent his visage to it as well. So I’m giving it a shot.



So with a new star bit, I continued the interior removal that I started last time and found a little bit of rust. Mostly surface rust here and there, and this patch above the subframe rail underneath the hatch was about the worst of it, but I didn’t want to have to pull the Dynamat later down the road to deal with the rust, so I knocked it down with a wire wheel, primed and painted it.



Here you can see the other few spots, painted black, where I encountered a little bit of rust. Mostly around the holes for the front seat brackets. And if you compare the two wheelwells, you’ll see that one’s all fuzzy while the other one’s, well, not. It’s the remnants of the jute padding that the factory decided to glue down to that spot, so I had to spend some time with a bottle of adhesive remover and some elbow grease to clean all that away.



The Dynamat instructions urge cleanliness over and over, so I hit the interior with a shopvac, then wiped it all down with denatured alcohol. Then I hit it all with a shopvac again and ran a rag soaked with denatured alcohol over it yet again. Even though it looked clean, it wasn’t.



Some people skip this step, but given the complexity of the AMX’s floor, I thought it best to make templates before I started slicing away at the sheets of Dynamat. To make the templates, I used simple craft paper that you can find at any hobby store or even at Staples. I then marked the flattest area possible to avoid too many compound curves. The Dynamat does stretch to conform to those compound curves – to an extent, more so the more you heat it – but I felt that laying it as flat as possible would promote its adhesion to the metal.



After transferring the template to the Dynamat, I then vacuumed and wiped down the floor again and started to lay the sheets. I started with the driver’s side, moving from the front toward the back, stopping just ahead of the rear axle hump. I then repeated the process for the passenger side and repeated it again for the driveshaft tunnel. Surprisingly, I only used three sheets of Dynamat per side, but four for the driveshaft tunnel. I’ll next do the trunk floor and the wheelwells, then I’ll go over it all again with Dynaliner, the gray stuff you saw in the lead photo.

I’m tempted to leave the interior like this, with no carpet. And I’ll wear a fishbowl on my head and start calling everybody Major Tom.



My fingers are slowly turning into hamburger. I shouldn’t be trusted with scissors and razor blades in the first place, but when you cut Dynamat, you’re left with a very sharp edge that’ll slice ya if you’re not careful. Oh, and if you really want this stuff to stick – especially to irregularly shaped areas or areas that aren’t perfectly smooth – you have to heat it to the point where you’re burning your fingertips every time you’re applying a piece.

Yet I had fun over the weekend as I finished covering the floors with Dynamat. Not because I love abuse, but because I enjoyed seeing this all start to come together and look just a little better. Have a couple tips to share with ya too:

There are many types of Dynamat (Extream, Dynaliner, and DynaPad.) they also sell Complete Car kits for some car models. Check them out here at StreetSideAuto.com/Dynamat-Kits.html