Project Starletabusa #3: Sitting in the Cheap Seats.

,


Now for the not so good:  For starters the bolsters are completely smashed flat and the foam inside has deteriorated to dust in all the high pressure areas of the seats. 

Miraculously the actual seat fabric was not torn or worn through in any places.  All that was wrong was a bit of decomposition in the stitching due to UV damage.

Well, there is this one other issue here.  I really would not want to use a CSI black light viewer on these seats!  To say the least they where pretty dirty and I can only hope that this was a milkshake stain if you know what I mean.

It's clear that while I may have a couple of nice items on my hands, particularly by boneyard standards, they still need some work to be usable.  It all starts with the hog rings.  What's a hog ring?  In the above image you can see a couple in their natural habitat.  They are nothing more than a piece of mild steel wire that is used to crimp upholstery onto a seat's frame.  Not rocket surgery, but you do need a special type of pliers to use them.  More on that later when these seats go back together.  For now I just cut off all the hog rings with great prejudice.  Soon enough the seats were surrendering their covers and without too much of a battle. 

Right away I found a broken spring.  Not too big an issue I hoped, although it was in the lumbar region on the driver's seat back and that area needs to be stout or sore backs will be the result.

After a good bit of work I got the seat backs off the seat bottoms and pulled off all four covers (two seat bottoms and two seat backs).  Here is a pic of what naked seat foam looks like.  Just to see what could be done with the embarrassing stains I tossed the covers in the washing machine, said a quick prayer, turned the settings to “hot” and added some Simple Green as a soap.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*
*