Applying sound deadening material to my Citroen C1

In today’s video, I’m installing some sound deadening material. I’ve not long gotten back from the City Bug Club Highland Rally and I noticed during the event that the interior of the car is loud! Driving 1064 miles in total over 5 days in a car with very little OEM sound deadening material from the factory isn’t fun, so I decided to do something about that.

First step is to remove the interior, so disconnect the battery and remove the front seats, so you don’t accidentally set off the air bags. As the rear seats were already out of the car from the rally, I haven’t showed how to remove or install these, but it really is quite simple and intuitive. Out with the plastic trim pieces that are in the way and then out with the carpet. Once everything was out, I could then make a start on cleaning and preparing the floor surface, so that it is ready to have the sound deadening material applied. For that, I used some blue shop towels and a gallon tub of panel prep wipe to remove the dirt and degrease the surface, which seemed to have worked well. I then set about laying AliExpress’ finest quality sound deadening material to the floor, using a craft knife and a roller. I made sure that I cut around the rubber bungs in the floor, so that if I ever need to drain water from the inside of the car (and we all know how badly they leak!), I’ve still got that option.

Once that was done, I set about re-installing the interior trim pieces of the car in the reverse order from which they were removed. I did notice that the bolts holding my under-seat subwoofer down to the floor are no longer long enough, so I’ve had to order some more suitable bolts – I’ll install those off camera another time. I then went about installing the sound deadening material into the boot area, with which I had help when Liz came home from work. Once all this was installed, I re-fitted all of the items in the boot, like the spare wheel, jack, plastic floor and carpet, then considered the job done.

After having driven the car approximately 250 miles to Modified Nationals 2023 at Lincolnshire showground and back, I can confirm that the car is considerably quieter on the inside than it was previously. I realise that using a better quality sound deadening material would have provided better results, but considering the car’s market value and the amount of miles I put on the car each year, I couldn’t justify the extra, not insignificant, cost for better quality product. All in all, a very successful, if not laborious task completed in about 10 hours. If I were to do this again, I’d definitely budget two days for this job, but I had to get it all done in one day because of weather restrictions.

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