That Looks Disgusting For 140 Dollars Please Alex…

Project Upholstery is now over two-thirds complete:

The last piece of the front seats (the driver’s side bottom) started out this week as a bare frame with burlap and felt attached:

And some cold upholstery:

Stretching cold upholstery is not the easiest thing to do, so instead up jumping right into the seat bottom I decided to introduce the vinyl to Mr. Shop Heater for a while:

While the upholstery was enjoying the fire, I brought down the back seat bottom from storage to see what I was up against:

While disassembling the frame I learned a couple things:

1. The foam in the middle part of the seat above does not appear to be there for passenger comfort. Rather, its purpose in life appears to be sound deadening by keeping the metal springs away from two metal support brackets.
2. The rear seat bottom upholstery was is worse shape that I remembered:
   
3. The Internet lied to me and the rear seat upholstery does not sit directly up top of the burlap like I wrote last week. While there is no foam padding like the front seats have, there is a cotton pad that’s about an inch and a half thick between the burlap and the actual vinyl:
   
   
4. The burlap covering the springs is a fair bit more involved than the design the front seats use:
   

While absorbing all of my new knowledge, I was tearing the back seat bottom down to its frame. My intent is to media blast, prime and paint it just like I did with the front seat frames. The frame was rusty (as expected) but thankfully it wasn’t as bad as the front seat frames.

After taking the padding, the burlap and the vinyl off the frame, I was left with a solid piece to begin restoring.

Once I was done disassembling the back seat bottom frame, I checked up on my marinating upholstery:

That temperature was much more to my liking so work stopped on the rear seat and started immediately on the driver’s seat bottom. Kaizen aside, this part of the seat fought me every step of the way. The upholstery refused to go on straight and took significant convincing to fit over the frame without binding up.

Finally, after what was probably two or three hours I had something I was happy with:

I then attached it to the seat back and took a family photograph with the two seats I’ve completed so far:

After that, I bagged the seats up and asked my lovely wife to help me lift them up to the rack where they’ll stay until I’m ready to install them in the car next year:

And that’s when this week’s blog post title got its name. While lifting one of the seats up, my wife noticed the rear seat padding that I had placed back up on the rack to re-use. The padding wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t terrible either and I had decided to skip replacing it since that part of the seat isn’t reproduced.

My plans changed with four little words uttered by my wife as she looked disdainfully at the padding:

Well that looks disgusting…

While restoring my car, I’ve obtained parts by raigslist, parts by salvage yard, and parts by parts car. We can now add parts by fabric store to the list after I visited Jo-Ann Fabrics this afternoon and purchased the densified polyester cushion and duck cloth (no, I am not making that up) I need to recreate the padding:

My wife’s disdainful reaction to the padding also volunteered her to help me learn how to use her sewing machine sometime in the next couple of weeks. For that, I’ll take “Have patience with me dear, I’m trying as hard as I can for $1000.“