- Did you hear that?
A comb-over joke.
That's why I got my sunglasses on,
give something else to shine.
(bell dings)
Hey, this is Davin with Hagerty and Redline Rebuild updates,
working on that 1950 Chevy pickup truck,
and today we're gonna tackle the seats.
I bought one of the quick slip ons and my friend here,
Adam at Hammer and Dolly Auto Restorations in beautiful
Traverse City is gonna help me out with this
and we're gonna make it sexy again, right?
- Absolutely.
(bright upbeat music)
- So Adam, what do you think here?
A couple days of, this is that, butt drag, right?
- Yeah, this is your driver's side seat,
the driver's side of the seat, where you're gonna be
sliding down off of and that's obviously
why it's the most tore up.
And I think, I'm not sure these were even
the original covers.
These probably got recovered at one point but
this truck had been sitting a long time.
I think, did they see you dig it out?
- Hell yeah.
- Yeah, they saw you dig it out, so we know,
- I doubt there's any environments in it.
- Right, I don't believe that.
- I did check it for snakes, - Maybe.
- I know there's no snakes cause,
- They may have been rats. - as I wouldn't be here
if there was snakes in this thing.
(Adam laughs)
There may have been a mouse, maybe,
a pleasant one though, I'm sure.
- Yeah. - But yeah.
- Anyways, so what we're gonna try and do is strip it down,
clean all the old horse hair out.
We're gonna throw some new cotton batting on.
We've got the seat covers outside, stretching in the sun,
getting warm and,
- Cool. - we'll see what we find,
once we strip off the layers. - All right.
- Yeah, this has like a clip on it.
- Yep.
- The most bottom.
- We'll just grab, we can grab some side cutters.
- Okay or a screw or some, flat screwdriver maybe
- Flat screwdriver and pry those off.
- Okay, famous last words, just peel, oh there we go.
Just peel them off.
Hey don't make me look bad.
- Am I moving too fast for you?
(Davin laughs)
Oh yeah.
- Yeah.
(cover rips)
You know, I've been removing covers like this
since I was a kid, right?
- Yeah, that was a long time ago.
- It was, my dad used to pay me for a cup of staples.
If I fill the cup of staples, I gotta like a buck.
- Yeah you can leave that burlap.
- Okay, no wire reinforcement, yeah, horse hair probably,
probably smells like mouse.
- And then some.
We stripped that off because we decided that,
it was still in decent shape
but it's smelled and
- Yeah.
that smell is just gonna permeate
the cabin of the truck.
- Right.
- So,
- Because it was only really gone
over in this corner,
- Yeah. - physically.
- And you could have, you know for quick purposes,
just stuff some cotton in there
and maybe throw in a cover over
if you had to do it really quick,
but you know, we want this thing to last pretty long.
And so we figured we'll just lay some new cotton over top,
- Yeah, okay.
- And then stretch the new seat covers on it.
- All right and the,
- The burlap here?
- The burlap here is in pretty decent shape as well,
but I mean, again, we could completely replace this or-
- Yeah.
- Cause it's gonna have some smell to it as well.
But obviously we've diminished it though.
- Yeah.
- Completely.
- We're gonna lay some new burlap over top,
a nice non stretch burlap.
And, but we've got these steel spring wires
stitched into the original burlap
and that would take a lot of time to, you know-
- Yeah.
- Clean off, put new stitched wires back
into a new piece of burlap.
Again for our purposes here, we're doing,
- For my non restoration.
- For your non restoration truck.
- Excellent.
- There's a truck.
- That's what we're going with.
- We're just gonna throw some burlap over top
hog rand some cotton and then seat covers.
- Nice.
- Cool, let's get at her.
- I'm ready, but you want some overlap obviously.
- Yeah you want some run over the corners.
- Yeah.
- It covers up those springs.
If your cotton pushes back over time, which it won't,
cause we're gonna cut the cotton large, oversize.
- Right.
- But if it pushes back, you know, have a hard edge,
it's gonna run through,
- Through the material, sure.
- your cover, so.
(scissors snips)
Just grab a pile of hog rings each and,
- Just like that, right?
- Yep.
- Trombone, of course we just,
we go right from the, move center out.
- Yep, you start at the center, wrap it over,
and then we'll work out to the edge and then,
- So, like that?
- We really don't need one, probably one every foot.
- How's that got a problem with that poked up?
Probably not cause you're gonna have the bat on here.
- No, yeah the bat, cotton batting would be fine.
- Okay.
- Smell nice.
- This smells good.
- Does it?
- Yeah.
- Good overlap on the front.
You know, roll that all the way down the end.
(scissors snips)
- Now you said this is a 100% cotton?
- This is a 100% cotton.
- Okay, it's as simple as the springs, burlap and cotton
and obviously the vinyl cover.
So these are 'do it at home' kits,
- Yep.
- And I believe, can't you go to any local fabric store
and buy a bag?
- Yeah, you can go to, you know, your local arts and crafts.
- Joann's or whatever. - Joann's Fabric Store,
- Yeah, Michaels probably does it.
- and they'll have some type of batting.
They might not have cotton like we have here.
- Right.
- But they would have like a polyester batting readily
available and you can get that in different thicknesses too.
So you may not have to use as many layers as we did here,
with thicker batting, but,
- Okay.
- Definitely something you could do
on your own at the house.
- Right, and I didn't, when I got the cover,
I didn't necessarily pay attention to what else they needed,
what else was available there.
But I do know, like in some cases like
the 60's seats that are foam based,
- Yep.
- That they have pre-cut foam as far as sticking
that in there, all those types of things as well.
- Yes, so most seats that we do today, we have pre-cut foam.
And then another thing you could do on top of this cotton is
put a sheet of foam on it.
- Okay.
- And that would have, that would smooth out your cover.
- All right.
- In addition to the cotton and the cotton would still have
it's build and it's cushion.
- Yep.
- Because it's very soft, feels good.
But then the foam adds a little more form
to the top of your seat.
- Okay, would it be like a quarter inch or?
- About half inch.
- Half inch, okay.
- You could go as high as an inch too,
depending on how much foam you wanted,
but a half inch would probably get it done.
- Okay.
- And, you know, if we stretch that seat cover over,
we may decide that we wanna do that.
- We may find we need it?
- Yeah.
- Okay.
- All right, so we'll get this up.
Let's try and find the corners.
- Okay.
- It'll act like, you know, pull it down like we're gonna
stretch it to the frame.
I'm gonna check it out.
(bell dings)
I would say at this point it looks full,
but, it needs more.
- It does, yeah you can see it.
- And I mean, as soon as you put your hand on it,
- It moves yeah, it's flat.
- it compresses way too much.
- Yeah.
- And with the way the cotton is kinda clinging
to the back of that seat cover,
I think we should put a layer of foam on it.
- Okay.
- And then that'll help it build up.
It'll give it a little more form and shape.
- All right.
- I got some one inch foam here,
or I've got some half inch scrim foam.
So if we do half inch scrim foam,
I'd go another layer of cotton and the half inch scrim foam,
or I'd go one inch of, you know, just foam.
- Gotcha, six one half of the other right?
- Well in dimension yes.
(Davin laughs)
I think we should try to use the half inch scrim.
- Okay.
- And that'll have a little more give to it.
The one inch tends to be kind of blocky.
(upbeat music)
We might go a little bit over the edge on the front.
- Right, okay.
(both mumbles)
I did, yeah, see, thank you, I found this one,
I have been carrying it with me.
(upbeat music)
Some thick cotton.
(scissors snips)
- I think we're doing all right.
- Yeah and you don't think that's,
I'll say fluffy, so to speak.
- It's pillowy.
- Right.
- But we haven't,
- We haven't pulled it.
- We haven't stretched it. - And it's gonna be down.
- Go ahead and pat right between my arms here.
- Oh yeah, that's it, yeah, it's gonna suck it tight, okay.
Okay, so we have a slight snag in how we were gonna do this.
So the kit comes with some hog rings.
The original seat uses this little metal clip
and the problem is a hog ring wants to grab around
like a piece of wire, where these clips
actually just kinda slide over this edge.
Now we can take and put the hog ring in here,
like Adam was saying, we can come in here
and we put the hog ring on, it'll hold it,
but it's not wrapping around anything.
So it's gonna tend to loosen up and then of course,
this is gonna get sloppy.
So to fix that, what we're gonna do is
we're gonna take a piece of metal here.
We have some round stock and form this around,
but we're basically gonna create some place for this,
to hog ring to.
And we'll just take the welder
and tack weld this rod in place.
- Let's do it.
- Is that a plan?
- Yeah.
- All right.
(upbeat music)
- And you wanna basically get this
as tight as you can get it,
- Yep. - is that correct?
- Yep, we're gonna try and get it as tight as we can,
- Cause it's gonna stretch over time.
- It's gonna stretch out, it's gonna get loose.
- This minimizes, how loose.
(upbeat music)
- Let's bring it outside and we'll get it to the sun
for it to acclimate.
- Yeah it kinda pull a little the,
- Pull this is gonna straighten it out.
- this little crease out of it.
Just from being in the bag and all that good stuff.
- Yep.
- All right, I like that, good deal.
- Okay you grab one end I'll grab the other.
- Okay, we gotta treat it like a baby, don't we?
- Yeah.
(both mumbles)
Okay, so that's how we went through and we did the bottom,
and all, on this particular on a bench seat,
it is the same process from the bottom to the back.
It's just a little thinner
has a couple of different little hooks
as far as how it attaches into the truck, but otherwise,
you know, it's gonna look exactly the same.
So Adam and I are gonna just bust this out, but hey,
thanks for watching and as you can see,
it's fairly straightforward, fairly easy,
well, with a little expertise,
a little expertise, and you know what the heck.
So I guess with that, sir,
- Thank you. - Thank you.
Appreciate the help.
- Absolutely.
- And, well actually I might just go get a cup of coffee
and you can knock this out.
- Why don't you get me one while you're at it.
- All right, I can do that.
(both laughs)
Hey, thanks for watching.
Click and subscribe and most importantly,
find a project, go in the garage, get it done,
and then go enjoy the day.
Cause I don't know about you,
but here it's nice and sunny, see ya.
(upbeat music)