This week I undertook recovering my steering wheel. The whole process took about 8 hours of Olympics - watching downtime, with lots of learning along the way. The wheel didn’t come out perfect, but I’m pretty pleased with it!

The wheel on my 924S is an old batwing style from a 924, so it just has the 2 spoke design. A previous owner had tried to recover it, but did the work somewhat sloppily and the result was a creased cover with fraying thread. It also looks like they didn’t cut the leather wide enough in the first place, so the result is too small.






I pulled the cover off and measured the diameter of the wheel, 380 MM. After this, I ran and picked up some material. Marine vinyl can be had from the local fabric store for $20 a yard, and worked great for my solution. I got some high strength upholstery thread in a dark blue to match the car exterior. It’s subtle, but a fun touch. Ultimately, the full price of the recovering was about $40, and I still have lots of material to spare. Still much cheaper than a new steering wheel.






Some quick geometry and a straight edge helped me cut out the right size sheet of vinyl, a little oversized so I can cover the spokes as well. You can see how I marked those above with a pencil. Now came the worst part, the dots!


I ended up doing a baseball stitch around the vinyl, with a 1/4 spacing between each stitch. The result looked really clean, but roughly 25 inches of material at that spacing resulted in almost 200 dots. But I think it was worth it!






And here is the final product! I think it turned out much better than before and it was a fun weekend project. Plus it’s not often you get to do work on the car inside in front of the TV!

 

wow very nice, good work!