I have a problem. I have saggy bottoms. Seat bottoms that is. After extensive research I decided to take on this project myself. I am sharing in hopes that others on this forum can benefit.
The easy way: Buy all new stuff from Airtex. I recommend this if your seats are ugly. There is an awesome to guide you through the process: https://www.piperforum.com/threads/interior-upgrade.18684/
Option 2: My seats aren't ugly, torn or even worn much. It seems they are an Airtex seat cover set from around mid 1990's to early 2000's. So I decided to hold off and get more miles out of the seats. What I really needed was to repair / replace padding and tighten up the slings (webbing as it's sometimes called).
Here is what it looked like when I bought the airplane:
Other than the carpet being a terrible sandy color not matching everything else which is gray, it's not bad. The seat vinyl doesn't exactly match the sidewalls,which are also Airtex but of another decade, it's not cosmetically offensive.
Option 2 it is. I have six seats. I figured I can start with the least used and work my way up to doing the pilot seat last. I started with one of the aft facing seats that we usually pull out to save some weight. This will be the experiment.
The first clue that something was bad in the seats is when I removed them for the first time and found a black powdery substance falling out of the seat. More on that later.
All of the covers are Airtex with velcro attachments on the seat backs and the bottoms secured with hog rings (this is common with household furniture upholstery).
The hog rings are tricky to pull out. Instead did it the brute force way. I bought a set of large wire cutters and hacked them out.
After removing seat covers, it turns out the black power was some kind of thin, black foam that someone used to cover the seats, and it totally disintegrated. But with a handy, powerful shop vac I was able to clean up the foam. It still looks a bit nasty, but only because of about 3 iterations over the years of putting on glue and ripping covers off. The foam still had a lot of spring to it so I decided to reuse it, especially because it is a fire retardant material that is hard to find. That and I'm lazy.
Next, the seat bottoms. I had a hard time figuring out what kind of material was used for the sling (webbing). Apparently you can use anything you want. I determined the previous installer just used some off the shelf mesh material. It looks exactly like the material on my kids' old playpen and my dog's mesh carry bag. The yellow color is just an over-generous coating of contact cement. They also put some staples in it to help the glue hold.
So that's the tear-down. Next, the materials selection.
The easy way: Buy all new stuff from Airtex. I recommend this if your seats are ugly. There is an awesome to guide you through the process: https://www.piperforum.com/threads/interior-upgrade.18684/
Option 2: My seats aren't ugly, torn or even worn much. It seems they are an Airtex seat cover set from around mid 1990's to early 2000's. So I decided to hold off and get more miles out of the seats. What I really needed was to repair / replace padding and tighten up the slings (webbing as it's sometimes called).
Here is what it looked like when I bought the airplane:
Other than the carpet being a terrible sandy color not matching everything else which is gray, it's not bad. The seat vinyl doesn't exactly match the sidewalls,which are also Airtex but of another decade, it's not cosmetically offensive.
Option 2 it is. I have six seats. I figured I can start with the least used and work my way up to doing the pilot seat last. I started with one of the aft facing seats that we usually pull out to save some weight. This will be the experiment.
The first clue that something was bad in the seats is when I removed them for the first time and found a black powdery substance falling out of the seat. More on that later.
All of the covers are Airtex with velcro attachments on the seat backs and the bottoms secured with hog rings (this is common with household furniture upholstery).
The hog rings are tricky to pull out. Instead did it the brute force way. I bought a set of large wire cutters and hacked them out.
After removing seat covers, it turns out the black power was some kind of thin, black foam that someone used to cover the seats, and it totally disintegrated. But with a handy, powerful shop vac I was able to clean up the foam. It still looks a bit nasty, but only because of about 3 iterations over the years of putting on glue and ripping covers off. The foam still had a lot of spring to it so I decided to reuse it, especially because it is a fire retardant material that is hard to find. That and I'm lazy.
Next, the seat bottoms. I had a hard time figuring out what kind of material was used for the sling (webbing). Apparently you can use anything you want. I determined the previous installer just used some off the shelf mesh material. It looks exactly like the material on my kids' old playpen and my dog's mesh carry bag. The yellow color is just an over-generous coating of contact cement. They also put some staples in it to help the glue hold.
So that's the tear-down. Next, the materials selection.
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