Broken mk4 door card

Does anyone have an idea for reattaching the door card insert back to the door card? I have attempted to hot glue it, that lasted about a week before the heat in the car compromised it. I have seen it suggested to put dynamat or other similar product on the back side of it to kind of tape it in place but i cannot imagine that lasting.
I cannot simply re stake it and sort of redo the way it was because not enough material remains in all the places to secure it.
I have considered cutting holes into the door card and the insert and running zipties through to hold it but i don't know how successful it would be and there wouldn't be much undoing that once i have made the cuts.
I was not able to find anything here or in youtube land about the issue or resolutions but i was surprised because its a common issue. Does anyone have a direction to point me on this? I would like to not just replace it, they are the black leather and otherwise in good condition. This is a car i purchased and am fixing up to give my dad to drive and he has a history of being hard on such parts so i need a durable solution.
If we can come up with a good idea i will make a youtube video to hopefully help some other vw folks.

I have attached some of mine that were beyond hope with small short drywall screws from the back into anywhere I can grab something. After the screw is threaded in and before it pokes through the fabric on the other side, back the screw out and grind it to the size you want. Then reinstall the screw in the same hole. Sometimes when there is nothing close to grab, I then found some large washers or brackets to span over to where there is good material to grab a screw. I found if you put enough screws in the right places it can be very strong in the end. It may look ugly on the back side but no one can see the mess on the other side.
I am going to remove a repaired panel in the near future and can show what I did. I have used drywall screws to put a lot of broken plastic parts back in their proper place without buying new ones. They even work great with a block of wood behind them to hold things on like bottom engine covers. Just attach a block of wood first to the the one side with a couple of screws and then you have something solid to screw into.

Another tip is to first pilot drill the hole in the first plastic part you are going through. That way you will not risk breaking stuff further if you are close to an edge.

Pl premium for plastics is your ticket

But how does the PL glue hold up long term?

Hi, tobert. You are right in thinking about zipties. I used this exact same method and they are the definitely the way to go. I took video of the project and steps from start to finish but I just never uploaded it, which I should. I would recommend using one size smaller ziptie than what I used. It will probably be easier to feed through the hole.

If you do use the same size that I did you need to drill back and forth with your 1/8" bit to open up the hole a bit, otherwise it's kind of a pain to pull the tie through. I broke a couple of the plastic tabs because I pulled so hard on the tie when it did not want to go through. The only reason I used the ones that I did is because I had a whole bag of them laying around.

Things that you will need:

• drill
• 1/16" bit (pilot hole)
• 1/8" bit (to make hole bigger)
• zipties
• plyers (to pull zipties through hole)
• side cutters (to cut excess ziptie)

Drill your holes


Leave as much slack as you can on all of your ties until you get your last one in. It;s much easier to work with this way.


Pulling them through with plyers


All cinched up


Excess cut off


All done!

that peanut butta leather :yum:

Im going to give the zip tie approach a go this evening. I may reinforce with the hot glue again to fill any gap and prevent wiggling once complete. I appreciate the time you took to catch photos

tobert said:

Im going to give the zip tie approach a go this evening. I may reinforce with the hot glue again to fill any gap and prevent wiggling once complete. I appreciate the time you took to catch photos

Click to expand...

Hot glue isn't necessary, there is no movement whatsoever from the ties. You may notice hot glue residue on the back of the door card in some of my pics. This was due to trial and error of me attempting to reattach it with hot glue before I realized that it wasn't going to work and figured out this method. Good luck!

I used hot glue on mine a couple of years ago and they are doing just fine, and it gets bad hot here in the summer. I was careful though when removing the inserts and still had some tab sticking up through the slots when gluing them.
I like the zip tie idea....pretty cool.
As a side note, a friend brought over his daughters Jetta one Saturday for some help with replacing his door lock module. He had taken it to a well known upholstery shop and had the headliner and door card inserts redone.
When we removed the door card I looked to see how they had reattached the inserts. It looks like they cut some scrap vinyl upholstery they had lying around into 6" by 1" strips and used them like pieces of tape all the way around, adhering them with the spray adhesive they used on the headliner.

the zip tie method above is tops and i've used it too but the last few i used the black hot glue sticks meant for a dent removal tool ... so far so good

i really do like the zip tie method over my screw method. the screws do hold well in the material but i think the zip ties would be more durable to long term stress. I have also used zip ties to salvage and repair cracked plastic shields under the car. This post reminded me how i used to do this with bailing wire. I supose that would work to if you dont have any zip ties.

Do some general searches, there are youtube videos and such that show techniques for repairing that stuff. That ziptie method seems pretty nifty.

I agree with the others, zip tie method works. Tedious but good results. I tried the hot glue first as well and got failure. Then did all four doors zip tie method as shown, still holding great!
For the few areas I just could not fit an zip tie, I substituted with safety wire. But don't twist too tight.

I saw on a Facebook group that someone had a fiberglass one made for the beetle. I'm sure the same can be done for our cars. It looked really nice too


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I am using black hot glue. The stuff used for paintless dent removal. So far so good.

I recently used the zip tie method to repair my broken door panels. I wanted to add that there is an additional way to prevent future damage.

On my 02, I noticed that the rear panels have a foam pad that fits perfectly between the door panel and the door, which adds support to the leather insert in the panel. There were no such pads on the front panels. My 00 VR6, actually had foam pads in the front panels. Apparently VW only used them on the 99.5 and early 00 mk4s. I got some from a junkyard 99.5 Jetta and put them in the front panels of my 02. I'm confident now that with the additional support, my panels won't be breaking any time soon.

If anyone is interested the part numbers are:

Left - 1J4868101B
Right - 1J4868102B





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Getting ready to re-do my door inserts this fall... excellent find VE1.9!!

Yep, pretty nifty.
Here's an alternative to hunting down these foam inserts, that I came up with a year ago when doing the driver's door insert on my '02: http://forums.tdiclub.com/showpost.php?p=5400233&postcount=2428