As much as I love black vinyl seating, particularly in a vehicle without air conditioning, I decided that maybe I would take a break from my masochistic tendencies & try something different. Besides, it was getting a little old always having to take my GF's Civic everywhere due to her lack of interest in back-sweat.
So, I ordered up a full set of black micro-suede upholstery from Kevin Chinn at
http://creativeoptions.info/ and set out to install it. This was my first experience with upholstery, and I will start by saying that you need to be in good physical condition to do it. I do a fair amount of rock climbing, so I have a fair amount of hand strength & dexterity...and I needed it. Getting this stuff hooked tight is a lot of work.
The total working time was about 4 days...2 for the rear stuff, and 2 for the fronts. Head rests, the arm rest & the hard sport seat covers took about 2 hours, combined. The necessary tools & consumables included:
- a SHARP awl
- 4mm Allen wrench
- T25 Torx wrench
- sharp sewing/upholstery scissors
- hog ring pliers
- ~250 hog rings
- zip ties
- assorted flat & phillips screwdrivers
- 17mm socket + wrench
- a hammer
- big pliers
- needle-nosed pliers
- heavy wire cutters
- some very strong spray adhesive (I recommend the canned stuff from RAAMAudio). Just about ANYTHING else will fail to hold the pleather onto the seat backs.
- curved upholstery sewing needle & nylon thread (for "oopses")
Without further ado, here is the adventure.
I began with the head rests. These seemed like the easiest parts to start with. They turned out to be more work than I had anticipated...when you think of needing upholstery to be tight, it is tighter than you think. I accidentally tore a small flap on one head rest tugging, but luckily it was out of sight, and I fixed it up with an upholstery needle & black nylon thread. You also need to try to get it on as straight as possible the first time around, it is a pain to reposition the foam inside the cover. Anyway, here are some pics of the dis/reassembly.
My next project was the rear seats. In retrospect, I probably should have done this last as I feel that it was the hardest part. Again...it needs to be tight. Being that the rear seats use the largest pieces of upholstery, they require the most brute force, and some practice with fitting the stuff & tightening it on the fronts would have been useful. While the fronts are more complicated, they are easier since the need less strength to do. I did the seat bottom with zip ties simply because I got impatient waiting for my eBay hog ring pliers & hog rings. I COULD go back & replace them with rings, but there really is no functional difference. Should they ever get brittle & break, I will swap them then, but that will probably be sometime after 2020!
As with all of the sitting surfaces, there are pleats on the back side that are fastened to metal wires in the foam cushions. I opted to poke holes in the pleats & secure them with zip ties.
The arm rest was a pain in the rear. I found that turning the cover inside-out and rolling it on worked pretty well. It is really tempting to make an off-color comparison to another activity that this is similar to, but I have said enough already.
Topic: The Great Seat Re-Upholstering Adventure [PICS] (Read 6699 times)