Jerry Feather

Perhaps I should put this seat recover thread material in the "GTS4" thread, but I thought it would be better here to stand on its own, at least from a single topic research stand-point.

By myself I am probably not as good an upholsterer as Dean Fuller, so, as usual, I am doing this project in conjunction with my favorite trim Guy and friend, Doug Corson. Or, to put it more accurately, I am going to be showing and telling Doug exactly what I want and I'll cut some of the material, and then he will be sewing it up; and then we will be working together getting it installed on the seats.

In respect to the ReDesign of these seats I have gone through numerous ideas in my mind and have, for this project, come up with something that is fairly simple and, I think, very subtle. Aside from the use of four different "non-colors" in these seats, including black, mediium to dark gray, light gray, and a tiny splash of white in the Porsche Crest in the headrest part of the seat backs, (all of which is not too subtle) the basic theme of the ReDesign is to simply change from four "cushion" sections in each of the seat components (seat bottom and seat back) to five each place.

I have also changed the manner in which the cushion segments are fabricated both to override the strong tendency for the corners at the top and at the bottom of the valleys in between to come out rounded, and to incorporate the contrasting material at the bottom of the valleys. See Picture 4.

Here are pictures of the old style sport seats in the GTS4 now and of the newer sport seats we are starting with for this conversion. These seats came to me stripped, so all of our patterning will have to be from sctatch.

The last of these four pictures shows the little mock-up of the cushion part of this project that we worked up out of some scrap leather several days ago. It is giving us some help in deciding just where we need to adjust our measurements to get the sizes correct and the covers snug, together with finalizing our sewing system.

The new design will have black welt cords and black at the bottom of the valleys. Then the majority of the seats, bolsters and side gussets, will all be in medium dark gray. finally the cushion sections will be of light gray. These three non-colors will later be carried over into the remainder of the GTS4 interior in contrasting ways, most of which I have not finalized yet in my mind.

Jerry Feather

Dean_Fuller

Looking forward to following this thread close. Sounds like a great design idea. So will the entire pillow areas be encased in leather loose and then attached to the seat as opposed to upholstering around them on the seat? I thought about that when I was doing garretts...may be the way to go.

Just the mock up looks better than my first attempt. When I can I will try the 89 seats.

Jerry Feather

Hi Dean. I am going to be posting progress pictures for this project much in the How To theme. Doug and I are going to put some time in on these tomorrow at his shop. I'll have some of that to post later tomorrow. Right now I have to go check on the charge of the battery to see if I can move the GTS4 around and get it set up to expose the rear wheel wells.

Jerry Feather

brutus

The contrasting colors (stripes) is very much early Ferrari Daytona in style but could be worse cars to emulate. Fun project and will be all yours when done.

ROG100

Those original early sport seats look in great condition and are rare - want to sell them?

Jerry Feather

Yes. $500 plus shipping. Or I can haul them to OCIC for you. Thanks for your interest.

Jerry Feather

Dean_Fuller

For tall drivers..those old sport seats like you have are great. My 82 had those in it and Devon at 6'-3 could sit comfortably in that car.

Jerry Feather

One of the first things that one must do to get a proper finished project is to do the restoration work that might be needed on the original seats. In this case it is not so much restoration, but the filling in of some formed recesses in the original foam seat bottoms where the original four cushions were affixed with hogrings. Since we are going to recover these seats with five cushions and since we are going to use a slightly different method, one more like the one used in the later style comfort seats, I needed to fill in the formed recesses so that they don't telegraph some irregularity into the final covering.

Here are some pictures of that process and some of the foam that I cut for the cushions. I have also started laying out some of the leather for forming the cushion segments.

Jerry Feather

In the last picture just above you can already see some of the patterns that Doug has been making out of the leather for the bolsters and sides of the seat bottoms and backs. Here are some more pictures of him in that process.

The one picture of the black material is actually vinyl. Doug made that pattern out of that for now since we are going to cut a larger piece of the leather for the headrest part of the seat back and have the Porsche crest embrodiered in it, then use the vinly pattern to trim those pieces out.

All the other patterns are out of the final leather and Doug will be cutting all the corresponding pieces from these patterns.

Now that I think about it I ought to copy these patterns in heavy paper or something because I think we are going to be covering at least two more pair of Sport seats at some points for my other projects.

Jerry Feather

I gave my cut out cushion segment pieces to Doug for sewing and he got after it pretty good.

In the fourth of these pictures I have placed a folded a piece of one of the bolster patterns and layed it on top of the cushion section Doug has sewn up just to show the contrast of the three non-colors in this project.

In the last picture Doug has sewn in one of the gussets for the cushion sides or end piece. This one is for the right front of the cushion which will have more of a rounded front corner rather than a squarish corner. Doug decided on a slightly different method of sewing these up from the one we used on the mock up we did a few days ago. He is going to have to study it a little to get it to work out since there is a really complex little bunch of leather right in the juncture of the cushion segment and the black leather in the valley.

I see by the pictures that the medium gray looks pretty blue; but in fact it is much more gray in real life.

Jerry Feather

Dean_Fuller

THOSE are going to look sweet!

Jerry Feather

One of the things I have learned about doing this kind of work is that there is a strange mixture between being very accurate in your measurement of material when it is being cut out and knowing where to "fudge" the measurements to accomplish the desired outcome. This comes into play in respect to the development of the cushion segments for the seat bottoms and backs.

You might notice in the mock-up of the cushions I showed in one of the first pictures (the third, I think) that the leather is kind of loose looking over the foam. For those I didn't give much thought to the fudge factor, so I made the leather the exact size that I made the foam.

After that, I asked Doug if there is an industry standard or trade formula that we should be following in order to get the leather to fit more snugly over the foam. His response was that in making a foam cushion one should cut the fabric the size desired, including the seam allowance, and then cut the foam to the size of the fabric at its outer measurement.

After thinking about that for a while it occured to me that the result would be cushjions that are very rounded, and in our case, would tend to close up the gaps or valleys in between the sections. Therefore I concluded that the opposite was probably the way to go and decided to cut the foam only a tiny bit larger than the desired measurement and then cut the leather to cover them smaller.

Here, since we are using one inch foam and the cushions are to be 3 1/2 inched wide (front to back) I cut the foam about an eighth inch wider and then in cutting the leather to cover, I made is as if covering 3/4 inch foam. The hope is that when the foam is "stuffed" into the sewn sections the leather will be pretty snug, but the shape will still retain much of the "squarish" look that I am shooting for. We will see.

Jerry Feather

Dean_Fuller

What density foam are you using for the pillows ? Sounds like you will not be using Dacron on the foam?
The guy here using Dacron to "fill" the area. Although your guy looks to do much better work then the guy I know here.

Looking good.

Jerry Feather

The use of dacron is still undecided. What I don't want is to have the cushion section appear too "puffy." I expect we will be using some Dacron over the rest of the seats, however.

Jerry Feather

Jerry Feather

Dean, I don't know the density of the foam. It is the densest that Doug has on hand, although it is not the best quality that might be available. If he is able to get the better quality before we need to start stuffing cushions, we will be going with that and I'll be cutting up some different from what I have done here. I sat on the sample that we mocked-up here on my computer stool and found it to be pretty firm, although it did not give me any hemroids.

Jerry Feather