An adventure in restoration.

It was raining all day today, so I put the Prius in the garage to do some work on it.

1st order of business was the clattering spoiler. Seems like EVERY car I've had with one, they can't figure out how to make a quiet one.

As it turns out, a garage door struck the spoiler with the previous owner(s) and one of the bolts was pulled through the metal of the car body, cracking it a bit too. A new fender washer solved that and now it does not clatter as much going over bumps.

Strange enough, the Toyota shop manual calls for removal of the rear wiper motor to get to the bolts, I found this to not be the case. There were no bolt access issues whatsoever.

But I have a complaint..I HATE the plastic interior clips Toyota uses. I've taken the interiors out of Fords, Dodges, Nissans, etc and most use metal clips which stay on the panel when removing it.

For whatever reason, the clips Toyota uses, stay on the sheet metal. I'm talking about the thin wedge shaped ones, not the cone shaped ones. You have to put them back on to reuse them, and sometimes they fall down into the car body. It took me an hour to fish one back out. Really idiotic engineering design.

Moving on, the fabric on the center console lid was coming unglued. Looked on eBay for another used lid. Ran into the same problem as I did with my Nissan SUV..people on eBay think center console lids (just the lid!) are worth their weight in gold.

$116 for a USED one? No thanks!

So I took the fabric apart further and used some Goop (actual brand of glue) and a million clothespins to hold the fabric in place for a few hours then put it back together. It's not perfect, but it is a lot better than it was.