KEE Auto Top Convertible Top With Plastic Window One-Piece Vinyl 1994-2004

Obviously there's a lot of benefits to owning a Mustang convertible, particularly on a nice summer day. The only real negative to the convertible is the convertible top needs replacement roughly every 10-15 years depending on use. Long before we even did videos here at CJ's, people would ask us how to replace a convertible top. It's one of those jobs we always said if you didn't have someone who knew how to do it, it's best left to a professional because it's not an easy installation and requires stretching of the top, stapling, gluing and even sewing in some cases, which is about what most average enthusiasts are going to want to do in their backyard. Kee Auto Top realize that a lot of their enthusiasts may want to do it themselves, and recently introduced a one-piece convertible top designed to be installed at home by your average mechanic. Personally I've never installed a convertible top on a late model Mustang, but today I'm going to give it a shot, using Kee Auto Top’s one piece top.

While the edge and top seam are also common failure points, this is the number one spot we see problems with late model convertible tops. What happens here is this piece of cloth separates from the glass, allowing water to get down inside your car, which is obviously a bad thing. This is original style top on this car still, which means you have a convertible top here, and then this piece of cloth and the glass is actually a separate piece, which makes for a more difficult installation. What Kee did is actually made this all one piece, which makes the installation a lot easier. I'm going to show you there top now.

These one-piece convertible tops are made of a high quality sailcloth vinyl available in your choice of black or white. They are going to fit your 1994-2004 Mustang. All the seams are dielectrically sealed to keep fluids out, and the plastic rear window is heat sealed into the vinyl. These convertible tops are made in the USA and are an excellent choice to replace a factory top on your 94-2004 Mustang. For this installation you'll need a small flathead screwdriver, needle-nose pliers, 1/4" ratchet, 10mm socket, extension, 3/8" ratchet, 7/16" socket, extension, T10 Torx bit, T20 Torx bit, T27 Torx bit, 1/4" ratcheting wrench, Phillips head screwdriver, panel removal tool, plastic pry bar, measuring tape, marker, stapler, spray adhesive, and clamps.

Once you receive your new top, the first thing you want to do is open up the box and lay it over the existing top. Make sure the lines match up, make sure it looks like it's the correct top for your car, then we'll begin the installation by removing the original top. We'll start by putting the convertible top down just about a quarter of the way, just basically to get it off the windshield, upright where you can still reach it, and we'll go from there.

When you order your convertible top, you'll want to order some weather strip to go with it as well because some of it has to be removed to do the new installation, it's a great time to replace it. We're going to start with these front side rails here, these little plastic clip, just pop them off. Pull that back, and then pull it out of the channel. With those out of the way, we're going to remove the 13 screws for the front retainer. With the retainer off you can see all those staples for the factory top across the front. Once everything else is installed, you'll just bend it around the front here and we won't have to re-staple it. But for now we have to remove all the factory staples to get the original top off. Once you get a few of them out, now you can actually get a grip on the top, to sort of pull and pop the rest of them off from underneath.

Once the front edge is off, I'm going to remove these 3 screws here holding on the side rail. On these corners, the top is going to be glued a little bit, so we have to use a pry bar to get it all the way off. Now we're back at the first bow for the convertible top. What we'll do here is carefully put the headliner aside, come up from the bottom, there is two bolts on either end to release the bow. Now we can access the 5 screws that'll release the bow from the convertible top. Now we're going to do the same process with the next bow, there's one additional screw you'll want to remove to take the headliner back, then unbolt this take it off and keep moving backward. You'll want to remove the staples so we can separate convertible top pad from the bow.

Now we're going to remove this weather stripping here to get the last part of the top off in the back. Remove that to access the screws inside. We'll just give it a little push, then pull it off. Then you'll see where the top is glued in here, we'll just pull that off. Then do the same thing on the other side. Now we're going to remove the third bow, which is actually the last attachment point for the top of our convertible top, it's also the top attachment point for your glass window. Now we're going to pull the stapled end of the glass up here so we can see inside. We'll work our way across and pull out all the staples again. At this point you can see our convertible top is separated from the back bow here, and I want to go through again and remove the staple holding the window in place.

Now that everything is separated we're going to move into the trunk. To remove the back edge of the glass convertible top is going to require you to get into your back seat and reach into the well liner. You're not going to be able to see that on camera, so what we did is we actually cut a hole in the old top so you could see what it looks like. In here you have these little plastic clips, what you'll do, basically just pull the well liner off the clip, and you'll see the bolt that's left behind. You're going to use a 9/16" socket, and then you're going to remove these all the way around to remove the well liner, and the rest of the convertible top. There's going to be 16 total.

Once the retaining strip inside the well is removed, we're going to move on to the tension cables in the trim up here. The tension cable is going to go from the front of the frame back to this spot here. What you need to do is lift up these two metal tabs and pull the spring off to relieve tension. You want to make sure you have the top halfway up, cause if it's all the way up, you'll never get this off. With the nuts removed and the retainer popped free, now we can remove some of the staples and take out the glass window.

To get the material off the side, it's actually held on by the edge of this panel, you don't really have to remove it if you don't want to because it's very time consuming. What you want to do is take off the screw back here and then you can lift up on these 3 clips and pull the material out. These little metal tabs, you sort of lift them up. You can actually rip it if you want to, but just lift it up high enough that you get it out.

The last part of getting the original top off is these tiny little retaining metal clips down here. There's two ways you can do this. If you want to, you can pull the quarter trim panels by removing the back seat and then the panels, that'll make it easier to get to it. If you're careful, using a screwdriver or some needle-nose pliers you can get them out from the top, it'll save you a lot of time. Again if you're not comfortable doing this, or if you happen to drop it, you can pull the panel off and get to it that way. What I'm going to do is just hook it on here, so that way it doesn't go back down into the panel when you're done. Once those clips are off, now we can remove the original top.

Now that all the original top is out of the way, and the car has been vacuumed out, we're going to begin the installation of our one-piece top. First thing we're going to do is take our convertible top pads and re-staple them to the rear bow. If these are really worn out, have holes in them whatever, it's the perfect time to replace them; ours are in fine shape so we're going to keep them. Now we'll start putting our new top into place.

This flap here gets stapled down like the original, so what we're going to do is measure the flap itself. It's 32 inches, we're going to make a mark at 16 at the center. This screw right here is going to be the center, so what we want to do is take our mark we just made, which was center, pull that right there and staple it on. Now we can install the next bow here. Put it up into place. We'll see if we can do the top, then we can reinstall the bolts, just make everything hand-tight for now, we'll go back and tighten them up a little bit.

For the next step you'll want to get a little bit of help if you can. What we're going to need to do is pull up on the convertible top material and then put the headliner up into place, and put the screws in from the bottom to hold the headliner on. So you'll want to make sure you get this as centered as possible. Once the headliner is attached to the bow, we can tighten the bow down. We're going to fold it forward, then do the same thing with the front bow. Again just get them loose for now, then we're going to attach the headliner to the top before we tighten them down.

With the top attached to the bows, now we're going to route the tension cables through our new top. Kee provides this string actually, makes it a lot easier. All you do is tie this string to the cable and pull it through. Just get it started, get it as straight as possible, and pull through. Route the cable down through the first retainer, then reinstall the protect the boot and pull it through the retainer, then go back to the front. We'll grab our hammer and just tap these flat again.

Before we can begin attaching the top to the back with our tack trimmer, we have to remove these convertible trim moldings, we want to make it easier to get the bolts in there to tighten it down, and also the flaps on the side go over this panel so this does have to come off. The edge of the convertible top molding have two screws, one located here and one approximately here. But to get to those screws, we're going to have to remove the quarter trim panels to access them, we're going pop out the back seat and then remove the panels.

The seat back is held on by two 10mm bolts at the bottom here. The seat out of the way, we can remove these two push pins. We'll pop the door seal plate up to give us some clearance here. There's one more push pin right behind here. We're going to move that out of the way just enough to get to the screws. Once that's off just pop off this belt line. You can see one there, and one there.

Now we're going to install the tack strip which holds the convertible top to the back piece here. Since it's done inside the car, it's going to be tough for you to see, so basically I'm going to show you outside the way it works. All these little tabs here, are going to go over these studs. They're all oblong except for the middle one is a straight square, it's the easiest one to find. What we'll do is we're going to put those on first inside the car, and once that's done, we're going to grab the original retaining strip, also known as a tack strip, and that will go on and bolt back in using the factory hardware to hold the top in place.

Once you get the retaining bolts for the tack strip hand tight, there's a very specific order you'll want to tighten them down to make sure the top fits evenly. You want to start with the center, then do the outside pieces, and then sort of do the middle and work your way in.

Once everything is bolted down, now you want to reinstall the two rear bolts for the main hoop. Now we're going to reinstall those screws to the tack strips that hold the sail panels for the headliner. Now we're going to put the top up a little bit and take some tension off of the cables so we can reinstall the two cables that go to the bottom front corners of the convertible top. This part will be a little frustrating trying to get the clip back on. This piece is going to be held in place by the three factory clips as well as the convertible trim moldings. What we'll want to do here is pull it tight, just get an idea of where it's going to go.

We'll have three metal clips over here, and then right here is going to be a screw. Probably the best thing to do is kind of figure out where the screw hole is going to be and punch a hole ahead of time. I'm actually going to screw that in to use it as an anchor point before I put the clips in. You don't have to get it tight, just make sure it's anchored. Pull this tight over here to install the factory clips we took off earlier.

Now we're going to fold this over so we can reinstall the weather stripping retainer. Make sure the square cut outs are over the two screw holes. We can reinstall the weather stripping in the channel, it's just going to press in. I'm going to reinstall the convertible top moldings, the sides are going to slide into the back piece. Once the sides are tight, we'll go over to the trunk and tighten up all these again.

This is another part of the install where an extra set of hands is basically going to be required. What you're going to want to do is put some glue in this corner here, that folds over, then you're going to fold that over and put a staple on it. You're going to the same on both sides, but once that's tight, you're going to pull down the middle and staple that as well. You want to bring the middle basically down til it's even with the front of this frame. You can pull a lot more material here, if you pull too much when you put the top up for the first time you're just going to rip it. So we want to get a nice even amount across here, there's a little cutout in the center so you know where you're working off of, and then we're just going to staple all that as well.

Even though it's stapled we're going to put a little clamp in here just to hold it to help the glue set. Also while this sets up for a little while, we're going to reinstall the retaining plate that we took off earlier. Once the header bar is on, now we can reinstall the weather strip retainer on the side here.

With the retainer in, we can reinstall the weather stripping. With the weather stripping now on our top, we can reinstall the quarter trim panels then we'll move into the well liner. Now we're going to slowly bring the top up. It is going to be tight the first time because it does have to stretch.

There you have it, Kee Auto Tops one-piece convertible top fitting your 1994-2004 Mustang. I gotta admit I'm actually pretty proud of this installation, like I said before I've never done one of these so I think it came out pretty damn good. This is definitely going to be easier than a 2 piece convertible top, but I'm not going to say it's an easy installation, it's definitely going to be time consuming. If you haven't done one of these before, watch our video, take your time, you should be back on the road in no time.