My interior upholstery work

[davidlkirby]

Hey everyone, it's been a full year since I got a leather seat kit from my wife for bday and re-upholstered my seats. I wanted to share some pics and my experience.

I've owned the car for 10 years, a few years before that, my dad put the engine in, did bodywork and painted it himself. Here's a pic from day 1 (1/21/2002):

Here's a year or two after owning it myself, after he'd moved on to another project (4/22/2004):

I put black carpet and speaker grills in around 2004. Burgundy doesn't look too bad half mixed with black.

Last year, I got my leather seat kit and started my first experience with automotive upholstery.

started with the back seats, taking off hog rings

transferring the support rods and reattaching hog rings was pretty straight forward

Lots of parts, figured I'd color change everything I could

Once I took the back seats out to work on them, I couldn't believe how loud those rear wheel wells were without those seats, I figured adding some dynamat would really be nice, think i used 40 sq ft (weighed 18lbs) sounds awesome rolling down the road all put together

Front seats coming along

back bench

seats in

most of the interior is all black now, I'd love to have some black seat belts, anyone know if it's possible to get black new ones that would fit?

for the vinyl panels and center console, I used about 4 bottles of this: VHT SP942 Vinyl Dye Black Satin Can - 11 oz.
after a year, I haven't had any scrape off. cleaning prep is important. you can see a bit of my rear side vinyl panels now black

My a-pillars were a bit of a challenge, the surface of them was all scratched and torn up. I tried dying it and it was crappy. then i plastidipped it, deep scratches still showed. Finally I got a deep black polyester fabric and spray glued them on, So far so good after 6 months, but I think these wont hold up great to fading in the sun. lucky for me now, my sun exposure is minimal, so it should last me

and finally, I took these pictures tonight, I couldn't believe how much the front seats had tightened up over the course of a year. When they first went in I thought they fit fantastic and were tight, but this looks even more factory to me:

I still have the drivers door panel to do, I got lazy and wanted to repair small tears in it, but couldn't think of a great way to do so, so I didn't even dye or put it back on the car yet.
Also my dashboard is still a torn maroon disaster. I've thought about buying a dash, but part of me wants to rip it out, smooth it over and flock it or something. If you have uncracked door panels or a dash for an 87 let me know. Color doesn't matter to me, my vinyl recoloring seems to work quite well.

thanks for looking

 

[57trimMKIII]

That looks great! :bigthumb:

 

[Silver MK3]

That looks really good. Any idea where she got the new covers for you?

 

[davidlkirby]

I got my kit from leather seats dot com. It was pricey, around $880, I think, but the fit and construction was excellent. Think she may have got it from one of their ebay listings which might have been a little less than on their website, not sure. She got the kit for our car that has real leather on the body facing panels and a decent quality vinyl on the sides and backs. Holding the covers in my hands, it was kinda hard to tell the difference between the real leather sections and vinyl sections. A casual observer would never know.

A nice unexpected perk was that my car still smells strong of leather every time I slide into it. I put in about 20 hours of work taking my time to replace the cushion covers and doing other detailed stuff.

 

[rodel]

Looks awesome! Good job.

 

[1988ma70supra]

Black interiors always look awesome and will never go out of style!!

 

[Jarvis]

Man, that looks great!

 

[757_supra]

Looks awesome, thx for posting. Question: did u have to remove your a pillars to finish them? If so, is it hard to do? Where is a good place to get the VHT spray? Thx. Good job.

 

[davidlkirby]

757_supra, I got my VHT from amazon. Removing the pillars might be the easiest thing to remove. You'll pull up on each end of the grab handle and push the rubber end toward the center, exposing a screw on each end. Once those are unscrewed, you'll pull the top and middle of the pillar out, then lift up and out to remove the pillar.

I'm not terribly handy, the most i've done in an engine bay is change an alternator and starter. The interior work is all very straight forward and simple. I'd argue that any of you could do this work yourself too if you have patience, time, and a good place to work and keep things organized.

 

[Poodles]

On the seat belts, you can usually have an upholstery shop replace the webbing (that's the proper term for the "belt" part of the seatbelts).

 

[suprarx7nut]

That. Looks. Gorgeous! Nice job turning an eye sore into a gem. I'm sure you'll get the dash and other pieces figured out as well. I have the leatherseats.com covers in mind for when I finally get around to the interior.

It's great to know it doesn't take an artist to turn out solid results.

Thanks for sharing with an update to show us how they hold up after a year. It's very motivating.

 

[Jay C]

Looking good. I also got the leatherseats.com kit but mine was two toned blue. I installed the covers but haven't yet installed them into the car. As you said i thought they looked pretty good at first but now i cant wait untill they tighten up like yours did.

 

[supra1008]

Wow just wow! I'm jelly! I wanna do that after I get A/C back in the car. I'd probably go two tone though Nice wife to get you seat wraps!!

 

[davidlkirby]

Poodles, Thanks for the tip, I hadn't thought of that.

supra1008, she got great wife points. i think she even discovered that they run a little bit of a discount on some of their kits on ebay, and once you purchase the auction, you can specify that usual options. getting seats is a great way to customize the interior to whatever color you want. I had no doubts, for me, it would be black stitching, single black tone.

suprarx7nut, my wife initially called a local upholstery shop. They told her that their process is to order a kit and put them on. i was intimidated by this project at first and decided i'd give it a quick try, figuring that if anyone was going to pull the car apart, I'd prefer it to be me. ordered hog rings and the tool to squeeze hog rings. other tools you'd need are strong snips, sockets and screwdrivers.

I started in the back, removing the fold down back seat tops and pulling out the bench. for each seat panel, just snip off the existing hog rings and peel back the old skin. the new skins need to have the guide wires transferred to them. I wasn't able to pull the guide wires out of the old seats, since they had slight rust and cling to the old guide channels. I had to use a utility knife to free the wires and they slid easily into the new guide channels. Then put the new cover over the foam panel, press the surrounding guide wire against the back frame and squeeze hog rings around the guide wire and frame to hold them together.

I had the back bench out and recovered in less than an hour, here's the underside of the back bench that illustrates the way the hog rings hold the covers on the foam:

the rear seat backs required a little bit of stretching and hole cutting for the bolt used to install it. you know that tab you push in to fold the seat down? I decided to allow the new cover to cover all that completely. Since it was a high tension area, i knew that cutting around the release tab would not look clean. the tight fit might even pull any hole i would make larger. having covered the whole corner, I just need to know where to push in to fold them down.

unbolt the 4 front seat bolts and disconnect the electrical connection to pull the seats out. Once the seats are out, you can remove the plastic pieces from the sides to access the socket bolts that hold the bottom cushion to the seat frame.

that bottom cushion is really easy to recover.

The front seat backs are tricky, and the head rest doesn't remove from the seat. You just unzip the old cover from the head rest and zip the new one on. it was really tight and took quite a bit of pulling to get it zipped. extra hands help here, but I much prefer a tight headrest cover to a baggy one. The seat back skins push down onto the seat backs. A few plastic pieces need to get transferred for the parts that go on the side of the head rests. I used a hand spring powered staple gun to affix the cover in place on the inward side of the head rest "beams".

I worked on this for about 20-40 hours, but I took my time on it, went the extra mile and had a few hold ups. this included:
taping up and re-glueing my drivers side foam bolster that had cut through the old covers (you can slightly see the damage in the pic)
vinyl dying every soft panel i could get my hands on, including the small roof liner our targa has and the center console
spray painting the remaining plastic panels I hadn't painted yet (all the seat and seat belt plastic parts, door pieces)
installing dynamat.

If I had to just recover the seats again, I think I could do it in 4-6 hours.

regarding wear and tear, I have no concerns with the durability of my new seats, but wanted to mention that my supra isn't my daily anymore, so a years-worth for me is 2-3k miles and minimal sun exposure. i leave the targa off and only take it on nice days, when that direct sunlight hits it parked at work 90 degrees. it gets T-O-A-S-T-Y!

Hope this info helps

 

[Jay C]

I cut the hole to fold down the rear seats on mine and then wondered why I did as I have never folded them down. IMO it would have looked better if I hadn't. As for the head rests they do come off which makes installing the new cover easier as it is a tight fit. The lister straps on mine were all rusted like yours so I made new ones. Why I had all of the metal apart I scrubbed it down to remove the rust and then painted everything with black Rustoleum. Your pics are giving me more motivation to install my seats into the car. Although I will miss the seats from my office as I think about the car every time I see them.