Front Seats Restoration Part 1

Due to bad weather we are taking a break from the body and working on the seats inside. My better half has been stripping and painting the parts for one of the bucket seats and it's a good time to start putting it back together with new stuff.

On the left is the old drivers side bucket for comparison. Now the original interior is blue, but it's getting changed to Palomino. On the right is the passenger side seat bottom frame cleaned, painted and ready to go.

The seats are just fried. This was a southern car all it's life and interior is just baked. Really baked. The bottom seat foam was brick hard and just crumbled to the touch.

This is the bottom part of the lower seat bottom support pieces. There's just enough left to make a pattern. But first the two smaller rods on the left originally had a protective cover over them and one is still kind of there. This is enough to make a pattern.

I have fresh burlap and Dacron for this.

I just used some Dacron for the metal rod cozy's.

It works for me

The next part is remaking the burlap bottom area with the metal rods inserted.

What we done is sew seams the correct length so the metal rods have something to clip into.

The next problem encountered was unfolding one end of the metal rods so we can insert them into the burlap. The rods are hardened steel and further work hardened when originally folded. Just unbending them and they will break. This means each of the 18 rods has to be annealed first.

Turned out to be pretty easy, just monotonous.

My better half measured, folded and ironed the pleats into the burlap to make stitching the rods in the burlap easier.

Yuppers more tedious work for one small piece of the seat.

Done. This took quite some time to remake this.

First we attached the part number tags back on.

This is the layout for the reinforced burlap sheet and the 4 metal additional support rods that get installed next.

All hog ringed in.

Continued in next post.