Seat restoration

[dd44068]

Hello all, I looking to restore the seats of my 68 in the winter, new coushions and to clean up the seat frames. I was wondering if there are any tricks I should know about before hand. Thanks in advance for the Help. I tried doing a serch for seat restoration, but nothing came up.

Dom

[Ghoste]

Silicone spray and a helper, you want to pull them tiiiiight.  I did mine last year and got a lot of help from this site, there are a couple of upholsterers on here.

[twodko]

Hello Dom,

Laying your new upholstery out in the sun to warm and soften it up would be a good start. However, since you'll be doing this project in the winter, some way of accomplishing the same thing will go a long ways toward making your task easier. Upholsterers use steam apparatus to do this. They turn the upholstery pieces inside out and begin a seat section by lining up a front seam etc then laying the cover down while steaming, pulling and stretching it until the section is covered, aligned and wrinkle free. Then its hog ring time and the bill soon after. Don't forget before/after pix, we want to see them! I'm doing my '69 shortly. Good luck.

Tom

[palindromes]

I'm doing this now on my '68 & just completed my passenger seat (Legendary seat foams & PUI covers) .  It was actually much easier than I expected.  The only issue I ran into was when I trial-fit the covers using spring clamps to hold them in place, they seemed pretty loose (the picture below is just one I just snagged off ebay, but is about how mine looked). 

I stressed over this for a while before finally getting some 1" foam (fairly low density) and covered the seat foams with it.  It took a little effort to stretch it over the foams but was still a one-man job & came out pretty near perfect.  I'm working on my drivers seat now & can try to snap a few pics as I go.  I'm no professional at this & we'll see how it holds up over the years, but thought I'd throw 2-cents from my experience.

[Just 6T9 CHGR]

A little tip I picked up and used is a piece of low pile carpet between the foam & springs when replacing the covers.

The carpet (as well as the factory burlap) acts as a barrier to stop the foam from bleeding through the springs giving you a firmer seat.  I used it on the bottoms & backs as well.

Do one seat at a time & use one as a reference.

Not hard at all....