So, I was at the dealership last weekend. My wife's 2010 Subaru Forester had developed a rather significant head gasket leak, a few exhaust rattles due to rusted heat shields, and had 2 bald tires. Total bill for all repairs and maintenance was close to $4500. The car had 91,000 miles on it and we had just made the final payment on it two weeks prior. We don't have that kind of cash on hand for repairs and to put it on a credit card would have been like making a new car payment for a whole year with no guarantees there wouldn't be other big $ repairs that come up. We decided it was time to trade it in. So what did we get?
Well, we wheeled across town to the Mazda dealership where I just bought my CX-3 in September and we got here a 2016 CX-5 Sport FWD in Reflex Blue with the optional rear camera package and a few accessories. She wanted AWD, but they didn't have any in the blue color she wanted, only black and Meteor Gray. The dealer searched other dealer inventories and couldn't find one in the color/options combo she wanted, so we settled on the FWD blue one they had in stock. Said it could take up to 3 months to get the exact car she wanted if they had to order it. Could get lucky and have one come in on a random shipment before then, but they couldn't guarantee it. So, now we've got two brand new, his and hers, 2016 Mazda CX's in the garage!
While I was there, I had the service guys take a look at my armrest. They ended up pulling out mine and swapped in one from another car on the lot. The mechanic said he put some felt material in there to help stop the squeaks. It's probably 95% improved. Still a slight creak, but it's tolerable. One thing I hadn't counted on though is that the little clip inside the phone pocket on this one was WAAAAAY tighter than the one in my old armrest. After only a day or two of use, the little felt pad on the clip was already starting to peel off leaving adhesive residue on my phone. So, I took it upon myself to disassemble the armrest to tackle this on one my own.
Four screws later, the whole upholstered top of the armrest comes off, exposing the pocket. The pocket is held in place by four tabs along the edge of the trim piece running the length of the armrest. Lift those four tabs out of their respective channels on the armrest and then slide the whole pocket forward toward the dash to remove it. I peeled off the little 1 inch felt pad off the clip. The clip on this one was bent all the way down to the bottom surface of the pocket. This made it require a ridiculous amount of force to get a phone in and out of the pocket. I actually cracked off part of my iPhone's Otterbox case trying to pull it out of the pocket.
After removing the felt pad, I took a heat gun to it to soften the plastic enough that I could bend the clip up a bit. I bent it up enough to give somewhere around 1/4" to 3/8" gap between the clip and the inside bottom surface of the cup. While the plastic was still warm, I applied a 2 inch long piece of Velcro industrial strength tape (the soft, loop half of Velcro) onto the clip where the factory felt was. I opted for a longer piece to give the phone a longer lead-in so the first contact spot was somewhere in the middle of the tape rather than at the edge to prevent any scraping action by the phone that would cause the tape to peel off.
Reassembled the cup and the armrest and gave it a whirl with my phone and found I had restored the feel of the original armrest and no more adhesive residue on my phone.
