Project Upholstery Is In The Bag…

Woohoo!

Two and a half months after starting Project Upholstery, the last segment of the project (the rear seat back) was completed this week and stuck inside a bag on a shelf for installation sometime next year.

Prior to this week, I had taken the old, worn-out seat:

and restored the frame and burlap backing:

The task this week was to recreate the seat padding, spring support fabric and finally do the upholstering itself.

I started with the seat padding.

On the padding for the bottom of the rear seat, I wasn’t able to use the sewing machine around the entire perimeter due to the separate section of the padding required to accommodate the bump in the center of the frame:

Once the pad was inserted, there was no way I found to use the machine around that separate section so I had to hand-sew all around it – a process that took quite a while.

Thankfully, the rear seat back has no such bump and I was able to use the sewing machine around the entire seam of the padding.  In order to insert the pad itself, I used a technique I learned from adding how to sew pillows to my YouTube  search history. At this point, I’m sure some programmer somewhere responsible for advertising algorithms at Google is throwing up his arms and crying out who is this guy in frustration.

The technique I used this week was to sew all around the perimeter of the padding cover, but leave an overlapping flap along the back of the cover that would allow for the insertion of the pad:

Once the pad was inserted into the cover, I was left with this:

It wasn’t perfect (I was exactly a 1/4 inch short of the amount of padding I needed and decided that was “close enough”) but I was fairly satisfied with the results.

I then turned my attention to the strip of burlap-ish material that I can only describe as a spring support that was unique to the rear seat back.

This material was similar to a heavy-duty woven landscape fabric in appearance. There were listing wires at both the top and the bottom that attached the fabric to the seat frame. Unfortunately, the fabric enclosing the listing wires had deteriorated to the point of almost breaking free so I couldn’t re-use this piece.

Not having this exact fabric, I decided to make due with my heavy-duty duck cloth:

With the spring support installed, I was ready to install the upholstery.

It went…OK.

This vinyl was one of the harder ones to install for some reason. I wasn’t able to get it to fit exactly the way I wanted it and it shows in the end result. However, in the end I was happy enough with the results to declare victory and call it a project:

I’ll write a retrospective on Project Upholstery sometime next week summarizing my thoughts and experiences. Overall, I’m happy enough with the results that I have no regrets doing this project myself.

The completion of Project Upholstery concludes the last of the “big projects” that needed attention while the Mustang was away at the shop getting painted. What’s left are small, individual little tasks like cleaning weatherstripping channels and painting wiper motor covers.

The task for next week is to take inventory of what these projects are and then get to work.