Removing Classic Car Upholstery

We are ready to start on the upholstery for our 57 desoto. First step is you have to remove the old covers. We're gonna start our project with the seats from what I could tell this has been recovered. The original upholstery is underneath this uh green cover. It was just covered over and uh we're going to take extra care to remove the original cover that's underneath this green cover. But the same technique and fasteners were used to on this original cover as well as this recover that's on it because we are going to be hand sewing the cover. We wanna save the original cover for an accurate pattern. There's uh two techniques to removing hog rings. You can either cut them and fish them out or you could just not cut them, but you know, just lightly grab them with the pliers and twist them out. As you can see there is the original upholstery. I'm not taking really any care to save these hog rings because they're a one time use fastener. You cannot reuse them. Apparently, they had some difficulty getting this to fit. So that's why they added this cotton padding in here. Wow. Is this stuff just broken down? Now that we got that off, we are going to carefully remove the factory seat cover. Now with the seat cover out of the way we can see that the, uh, foam from 1957 serves no cushioning power anymore. This is gonna be a mess, but we're gonna have to get this cleaned off to get to the horse hair and burlap that is wrap and hog ring to the frame and that area this actually feels like home. Some unique stuff covering the seat springs is uh a layer of burlap and the burlap is there to keep the foam from just cutting through the seat springs. And uh in some, a lot of older vehicles, I've noticed that they sometimes have small steel rods running the length of the burlap and you can reinstall those, but a lot of times they're usually just enough rust on them that you really can't clean them up and reuse them. So typically, you'll just use another couple layers of burlap on your springs to keep you from feeling individual seat springs with all three layers of our seat padding material. Here, we can show you the burlap, the horse hair and the foam and the reason that combination is used to even out the distribution of the individual springs. So you don't feel individual springs when you sit down on the seat, soft products on the car will hold scent. So if you want to get rid of the, the old car funk, you really need to replace all these layers and it's very clear that our fall is no longer any good. You have any broken or rusted out springs, you can still purchase all the parts needed to service it and replace them. You can see that the seat bottom is zigzag spring steel and on this back rust, it has coil springs. All these parts are still available and you can purchase rolls of zigzag springs and individual coil springs to replace any broken springs you have in the seats. And they also sell, this is the mo the only way they usually attach these is with edge wire clips and they sell edge wire clips and edge wire clip, pliers. Repairs on springs is real simple. It cut the length of spring wire you need be if it is bent to the correct contour and then simply remove and replace that spring. Well, there you have it. After we get these back from the beef blaster and throw a coat of paint on these, we will be ready to start upholstery.