Van Desmoking

Some pictures of van interior disassembly and cleaning.
The Hiace I got was listed as lightly smoked in and having a slight smell. Clearly someone detailed it as Pacific Coast got it from auction from a Toyota dealer. It's not a bad smell at all, but the thing that has annoyed me since I got it was anytime you touched a soft surface in the van, your hands came away feeling dirty.
So here are some pics of van interior disassembly and cleaning.

The current plan is:
Take out all carpets and soft touch pieces, clean with oxy carpet cleaner.
Take out all plastics and scrub with dish soap.
Take out seats and wipe down and scrub with oxy cleaner.
Clean headliner in-place (I might be convincing myself to take this out too).
Take out dash (for other reasons too: radio, HVAC heat weirdness) and clean out fans, ducts, everything I can get out.

Front seat and carpets out

I am amazed how easy Toyota made it to disassemble these vans. No modern car would have snap-in carpets.

Rear speaker grills clean(right) vs. dirty(left):


Rear area stripped of carpets, seats, and curtains:

Good work.
The smell of smoke is very hard to get rid of and I've never been able to understand why anyone would knowingly fill themselves with it.
I hope you have a supportive partner who is contributing some of the effort involved.

Classic Japanese auction car. Generally, a smoker in Japan smokes like an absolute train, cigarettes are so cheap there. So many vehicles can (should!) be almost unsellable.

Great effort!  I waited 18 months to find a van that hadn't been smoked in (and bought it) but yours should be recoverable.  The industry does use ozone generators to take odours away (ozone is reactive and effectively gives an oxygen atom to the nastys changing their composition).  Looks like yours has something more like you'd find in a kitchen with insufficient fume extraction. Theres a good chance that cleaning it how you intend will fix it well enough.  If there's stil odour through the aircon ducting then maybe see if you can get an ozone generator onto that.  Lol looking through your photos I see a few items I have removed including that long trim piece (about 4m) from the right hand side.  Mine had to come out for me to find an extra amplifier behind it that I removed to fit a regular stereo system.
Good luck!

Edit: I must add that I can't find any good evidence as to the efficiacy of ozone generators for removing odours. A quick google shows that they might work on a whole lot of oxidisable compounds but there don't seem to be any scientific studies to show it's really effective. If you have a mate in the auto industry maybe ask them about that!

AgathaAlice wrote:

Good work.
The smell of smoke is very hard to get rid of and I've never been able to understand why anyone would knowingly fill themselves with it.
I hope you have a supportive partner who is contributing some of the effort involved.

Agreed. I will never understand. And yes, she is very supportive of my questionable projects and hobbies. She doesn't even get (too) mad if I am using the shower or kitchen sink to clean parts.

Mine certainly was not that bad, I stayed away from anything that seemed heavily smoked in so I could live without doing this, but it's sort of fun to do the work anyways.

Did the main carpet today. It released a nice cigarette/coffee/soda soup into the wet vac when I was done.



Did a test side panel too to make sure the brush and oxyclean combo were not too strong and took off the "velvet". Just the right amount (dirty left, clean right).

Biig difference there...
Once all put back together will feel bigger.
Are ya gona touch the roof lining?
Good job..

OKJDM wrote:

Biig difference there...
Once all put back together will feel bigger.
Are ya gona touch the roof lining?
Good job..

Definitely. I purchased a bulk pack of foaming carpet cleaner to us on the ceiling liner. I am not confident enough to take it out all the way. I have seen people doing it, but it's usually people replacing the interior and so I doubt they're too careful about not putting any marks on it or anything. My goal is to keep it basically stock.

So I think I'll hit the ceiling liner and sunroofs with the foaming cleaner, scrub with the same soft brush as I've been using on the velvety parts and then wipe it all down with a damp cloth. I know that won't be as thorough as a true cleaning, but I also would rather leave a little dirt than destroy the headliner.