Recovering your seat

supertex · May 21, 2009

Lots of pictures. This is my first and probably last attempt at a "how to" so please forgive if it is hard follow.

Seat as I've cut down. Shape of the seat doesn't matter as covering it can be done using same steps. I used the same foam from old seat. Not ideal but I'm cheap.

Wrap a piece of your covering material around seat. Use staples to hold material on pulling and tucking as you go. Don't need too many cause your going to pull them out later. Start in the middle when using a big piece like this. That makes it easier to get the wrinkles out moving to the corners. Make sure your also wiping the wrinkles as you pull.

Use pliers if you need a better hold on the material. It gives you more leverage and allows you to staple with your other hand. Make relief cuts also, to get around the curved edges. Of you don't want to sew anything, you can use more staples now, folding and pulling until you believe it tight enough. The key to getting a tight fit is to wipe wrinkles to the edge as you pull and staple. Heat at this time will help.

After your satisfied with the texture and lack of wrinkles across the top, take a piece of chalk or maybe soap or a marking stick from fabric store and mark the edges where you would like the seam to go.

Take out all the staples using a standard screwdriver and needle nose pliers. Cut the material out a half inch around the line. Now if you have plenty of material you can cut down the line and use this as a pattern for your seat, no matter how many times you want to recover. This is what I did. If you choose this route use the pattern to mark another piece, remembering to use the proper side of the material. Now, cut it out leaving a half inch around to give us room for a seam.

Turn it upside down now and mark one more piece, cutting along the line.

face the 2 pieces together.

Start sewing straight down the line making sure to back-stitch at the beginning and the end.

cut the inside out of the bottom so we can slip it over the seat assembly.

Turn the cover outside in, using heat from a heat gun to make the material more pliable and easier to work with. Pulling and wiping just like we did before, staple the cover back on.This time start from the front, or the most curved places, as these are the tightest fitting and need the most work. Cut around mounting hardware and use plenty of staples.

Everything came out well and would have looked better had I replaced the foam. The line you see off of the edge is a ridge in the foam.