Reupholstering Seats Questions [Archive]

My5ABaby

06-24-2010, 02:13 PM

My upcoming project will be reupholstering my seats. I'll be looking to pickup a set of TII seats. I would like to use real leather. The other part is that I'm planning on adding heatng and cooling to the seats so I would need perforated leather for part of it. I have a few questions about it for someone who's done it before.

What thickness leather should I look for?

What type of leather?

Any good places to buy it?

Pete_89T2

06-25-2010, 10:15 PM

I reupholstered the stock leather seats in my '89T2, but I just bought a set of leather seat skins from leatheseats.com, to replace my worn out stock leather. It's a nice quality automotive-grade leather; not as soft as the Connelly hides you'll find in a Rolls or Jag, but nice enough for the '7 and better than what Mazda provided. The foam padding underneath my seats were still in great shape, so I didn't have to mess with that. If you were at DGRR-X, you may have seen the result - I have the black-on-black T2 that won 1st place in show this year in the 2nd gen category.

Anyway, there was a group buy for these back in '05 at the other forum, which is how I got them. The job was fairly easy, but can be tedious - just take your time. The kit came with plenty of hog rings and a hog ring plier which is needed to do the job. After removing the seats from the car, you'll need to remove the plastic trim on the seats and separate the seat back from the seat bottom. Then you basically just snip/pry open all the old hog rings, and work the old leather off the seats - you'll want to be persuasive but gentle here, as the object is to get them off without mangling the seat cushion foam. Installing the new skins is basically the reverse of removal, but again be patient & persistent - it's harder to get them on than off!