1/26/04
Truck Seat, Ferrari Armrest

I stopped by Frank’s shop today to see how my seats were coming along. He had to rebuild part of the seat cushion because a spring broke inside the cushion, and tore up the foam a little bit. After fixing the spring, he filled and covered the area with new foam.

Frank pulled the ripped area off the side of the seat cushion and tried to find material he had laying around the shop to match the original material. He couldn’t find the exact and was about to order some material when I stopped in. The material he had was close enough, and looked way better than having a gaping hole in the seat, so I told him to go ahead with what he had. It’s funny, I had to remind Frank that although I’m restoring my Ferrari interior at his shop, I certainly don’t expect my truck to be repaired the same way!

Here’s the seat reinstalled. You can see the material closer to to the camera is slightly different in color and pattern, but my butt will be covering this area most of the time, so no one but you and I will ever notice!  There’s one more tear on the side bolster, but it’s not as bad, so I’m going to hold off on it. When it gets worse, I’ll just get a complete upholstery set, and redo both front seats.

For those who care to know, a job like this should only take a couple of hours of work plus the material, so Frank would charge about $140 bucks, provided there are no broken parts inside the seat.

Since I was at the shop, I couldn’t help not doing a little work on the Ferrari, so I started working on the center armrest for the back seats.

The nose of the armrest follows a nice curved shape, but the leather underneath has to be trimmed to keep it from puckering up as you see here. This pucker will show through on the top side when everything is stretched into place.

The width of this leather was necessary for the sewing machine to lay its stitch down, but now that the pieces are joined, the excess can be cut off. There are four layers to cut through including the piping, and care has to be taken not to cut into the stitch or else the whole thing will come apart and will have to be scrapped.

The preliminary stretching looks good. I tacked in some of the leather to the base to get it to set. When there is time, Frank likes to have the leather stretch a bit before it is glued in for the last time. The leather gets a “set” and will conform better on the final fitting. I left my armrest to set up for next time!

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