Front Seat Upholstery Installation

Before taking the car to Tampere I stripped the interior almost completely. The Mustang pretty much contained only the driver seat. This meant I could try changing the upholstery on the passenger seat. It had clearly been changed at some point, most likely in the 90s during the last restoration, but the color had faded badly. CJ Pony Parts had a nice video of the operation in YouTube so I followed its instructions.

There were no tears or holes in my seats, but they just looked ugly with the discolouring. I considered buying some vinyl dye but after asking around, I found out that it would have cost almost as much as the new covers and most likely getting the right color would have been difficult. So, I ended up ordering new front seat upholstery.

After disassembling the seat, I decided to begin with the back rest. I removed the back cover and cut the dozens of hog rings that held the vinyl on the frame. I was careful not to damage the old upholstery if I happened to need it later. I also found a Distinctive Industries tag in it so as I had suspected, they had been replaced earlier.

I was glad to find that the foam and seat frame were in really good condition. All I had to do was install the new cover.

I also reused the old listing wire. I pulled it out of the channel in the old cover and pushed it in the new. Then I followed the install order mentioned in the video. I hog ringed the top of the listing wire to the frame and then pulled the cover over the foam.

Then I added more (many, many more) hog rings to the listing wire and the back of the frame. Finally I removed the metal pins from the old seat back and installed the new on.

Couple of small wrinkles were left to the top right corner of the seat back that I could not get out. Let's see how those settle after some use but I wasn't too disappointed for my first try at upholstery project. It kind of felt that the new covers were a bit larger that the old. Most likely the foam has compressed a bit during use. Perhaps adding a thin layer of new foam would help?

Then I had to do the same thing with the seat bottom.

I unbolted the tracks and cut out the old hog rings. After carefully removing the cover I was rewarded with a really good condition foam again. I followed the same routine as before and installed the new upholstery.

Then all that remained was assembling the seat.

All in all, installing the new upholstery was not that difficult and it made a huge difference with the look of the seat. Now I just have to do the same thing for the driver seat when I get the car back.