Postmortem Upholstery…

With Project Upholstery in the bag, I thought I’d write up a quick retrospective on the experience of doing the upholstery work myself vs. paying someone actually qualified to do it for me.

Well over a year ago, I got a verbal quote from an upholstery shop in town for “around a 1000 dollars” to reupholster two bucket seats and a rear bench. A quick Google search tells me that this quote is actually on the lower end of the usual 500 to 2000 dollar range for this service.

By choosing to do the work myself, I brought the cost down to materials only. By purchasing on sale, I got the upholstery and foam for somewhere in the neighborhood of 280 dollars. Adding to that was the cost of de-disgusting the rear seat padding as well as the hog rings and pliers and all told I probably spent in total around 450 dollars for materials. This means at a minimum I saved 500 dollars and quite likely more.

Was it worth it? In my mind yes – though reasonable people in different circumstances may disagree. I’ve stated a number of times that I’m not building a show car. If I had been, I would not have been satisfied with the results. However, for my nice driver car I think the results are more than satisfactory.

As with all things, practice makes for better results. My first attempt to reupholster the passenger side seat back suuuuuucked:

After taking that all apart and trying again, my second attempt turned out better:

As time went on, I got better and better:

to the point where I’m pretty proud of how the rear seat bottom turned out:

Are the seats perfect? No. Are the imperfections worth saving at least 500 dollars? In my mind totally yes.

Part of my satisfaction in doing the seats myself lies in the fact that I took the opportunity to learn how to do it. Being able to learn a new skill and point to something and say “I  learned how to do that and did it” is a neat feeling – especially for something as far away from my existing skill set as upholstery.

Naturally, part of learning a new skill is learning from mistakes. There were no shortage of those during Project Upholstery.

The biggest mistake I believe I made was in not using listing wires for the inner seams of the front upholstery. A common problem I had was not being able to get the upholstery to sit quite right in the seat foam channel. In the picture below, you can see waves in the inner upholstery seam at the top of the picture:

That area should be straight, but I was never able to get it just right. I think I finally know why.

The original Youtube video I watched told me I needed to make my own listing wires and insert them into the listing wire channel in the new upholstery. However, that video was talking about a different kind of upholstery than the type I had so when I pulled my original seat covers off and didn’t see anything resembling a listing wire channel:

I began to wonder if my type of standard-interior upholstery used listing wires at all. Nevertheless, when I did my first seat, I looked at the area where the upholstery attaches to the seat foam for a channel of some kind. What I found appeared to be a solid piece of fabric rather than something I could insert a wire into. At that point, I decided that all I needed to do was attach the hog rings to the solid piece of fabric and go on.

I was totally convinced that I had done the right thing until the following video was released not long after I finished the front seats. When I saw the following section where the upholsterer is installing listing wires into upholstery that looks exactly like mine, all of my assumptions were called into question:

At that time that video was released, I was working on the rear seat bottom. That upholstery had the same solid piece of fabric for hog rings as the front seats did. However, a closer inspection revealed that that what I thought was one solid piece was actually a tight loop of fabric that a listing wire could be inserted into.

My theory is that the lack of listing wires made the hog ring attachment points cause the waves in the seams with the low points where the hog rings were. If I had inserted the wires in the channel, the wires would have spread the load out – causing the seam to be straighter and smoother.

I still don’t see any way for the original upholstery to have had a listing wire channel so there’s still a small chance I didn’t screw this up. To know for sure I’d have to tear one of my completed front seats completely apart. I’m not willing to do that at this time so the final verdict will be left to whomever recovers the seats next.

 

Another mistake I made was in not knowing that reproduction upper seat back foam was available. I discovered this problem (again on my first seat) when I couldn’t get the the upholstery to fit over the top of the seat quite right. The upper seat back foam had come off with the upholstery and I had not seen it and hadn’t put it back on when I first started covering the foam with the vinyl. This was causing the vinyl to not sit tight at the top of the seat.

Thankfully, once I discovered my mistake I found that my upper seat back foam was in re-usable condition. Aside from an odd foam color combination this mistake didn’t have any long-term impact:

 

I also learned that you always pull on the upholstery itself and never, ever pull on a seam:

This mistake was made (once again) on the first seat I did and caused an hour delay while I patched the rip as best I could:

Lastly, I also learned that you will always use more hog rings than you think you will. I ran out early in the process of recovering the rear seat back and had to purchase more.

One of my measures of success during a postmortem is the question if given the opportunity, would you do it again or pay someone to do it for you? With all I’ve learned over the last couple of months, I can easily say I wouldn’t hesitate to do my own upholstery again for another driver-quality restoration. I’d save money and I’d like to think I’ve learned enough from my mistakes on this project that I’d do an even better job on the next.