I’m thinking it will be less of headache to just buy new seat covers. By the time they get repaired and painted might as well buy new since end of the day I’m left with painted seats. NPD sells them for $91.50 per front seat which seems reasonable. Hopefully the grain pattern is correct for a Cougar? http://www.npdlink.com/store/products/mustang_upholstery_front_bucket_standard-137778-3057.html
Bob, I was thinking of going with the smallest rivet possible then painting the rivet head black with a small touch up paint and brush. I will try a rivet out on one of the old beltlines first and check it out. I’ll post a picture later tonight of how the previous owner installed the beltlines for the rear quarter windows lol. What kind and size of staples did you go with? The original staples I removed looked heavy duty and a lot thicker than any staple my office hands are use to seeing.
For a professional this would be an easy task. My plan is to tackle the seat foam and covers myself. I’ve watched a couple YouTube videos and it seems like something a DIY can handle with some patience and strong hands. Just got to buy a hog ring cutter, installer and some hog rings.
Steve is correct that it would be a relatively easy job for a professional. My son-in-law does car upholstery for a living and the biggest problem he encounters is that the reproduction foam is not completely correct to match original or reproduction seat covers. He typically has to build up the foam to match the covers which is much harder than making the covers to match the foam.
And Steve, I also tackled upholstery once in the past on my old 69 XR7 convertible and I will never do it again. At least not as long as my daughter stays married.
I am enjoying this thread as I am part way through a similar job (on a smaller scale) on my 1970 XR7.
I would like to hear how this part of the job turned out. I am having a set of original leathers sent to me to install in my car and might need new foam, so would appreciate hearing about any lessons learned.
Also, what are you doing with your dash? My local dash guy said he can reskin the dash for me (mine is cracked), but that I would loose the faux stitching at the front of the dashboard (he said I would see a line, but not the little stitch marks).
Some day in the not so distant future (I hope) I’ll be tackling the interior of my now crusty Cat with new upholstery and seat foam, so I can’t wait to hear how it works out for you.
Here’s a couple vids for installing seat foam and seat covers I watched and book marked over this past winter that gave me the idea of doing it myself. They are your average DIY back yard kind of guys minus the poor acting. I just skip through all the acting parts. They also got some good videos on installing a headliner, rebuilding a heater box, etc, etc. All items I will try to tackle.
Got to spend the day today on removing the lower dash. Wow a lot of stuff going on behind the lower dash. It wasn’t hard to remove it all, I guess removing it is the easy part, but I did label, tag, bag and took 300 photos so hopefully I’m good to go in the future on 90% of everything.
Started out with this today
Steering column out
Detaching the wiring harness to the lower dash
Lower dash out. I’ve got a lot of extra wiring going on such as car alarm, etc.
Got rid of the extra wiring such as car alarm and power antenna as I’m taking the car back to stock as much as possible
Wiring harness out
And finally the rest of everything attached to the firewall
Spent about 7 hours today doing this. First time doing this and I work at a snail pace but it wasn’t that difficult. I have a feeling it’s going to take 40+ hours to put it all back together after all the bits and pieces are cleaned up and ‘restored’ first.
I purchased my front seat covers and foam from WCCC then did the work myself. I am very happy with the results. This was by no means an easy job and I took a lot of skin off both hands. Through trial and error I found that assembly in the proper order made the job much easier.
whitepink59 it wasn’t that hard, just slow process taking lots and lots of photos and documenting as much as possible. That’s good to hear on the front seats Tomcat.
I’ve committed to relocating the clock from the gauge cluster and relocating the interior clock to the passenger side of the car and putting in a 8000 RPM tach in the gauge cluster where the clock use to be. I’ve obtained a used XR7 clock mounting housing and attaching hardware to install on the rear side of the dash pad on the passenger side. I’ll check this weekend to see if the standard cougar clock mounts into the XR7 housing with no issues.
I would like to use my original wood grain passenger side dash panel and cut a hole into it but not sure how to go about that. Does WCCC allow you to send in your original wood grain dash panel and they send it out to have it perfectly CNC cut? And also, once the whole is cut is there a certain type of bezel which outlines the hole?
Been awhile since working on the car last but now that my hockey playoffs are finished and a couple major deadlines at work are completed it is time to get moving on the interior pieces. Worked on the seat belts tonight. Man were they dirty.
The hard plastic covers which protect the front seat belt retractors on my original black seat belts were cracked which causes the seat belt to retract inside the plastic cover making it a pain in the ass to dig it out every time you go to put on your seat belt. I was lucky to get some used green ones from Kim in my local Cougar club. Thanks again!
After soaking them in hot water to soften up the hard plastic a bit I separated the seat belt and seat belt retractors from the hard plastic covers. Next it was time to paint the green into black. Wiped them down with wax and grease remover then shot them with some SEM plastic paint. Got 3 light coats on them right now and will hit them with 2 more light ones.
Always a good idea when painting or working around any organics to get a nice mask designed for organics.
These little attachments to spray paint cans are really handy. Makes spray painting easier and I find a lot more control and accuracy. Plus it saves your finger tip. Think I paid something like 3-4 dollars for this one and it has lasted me a couple years now with no complaints.
Next it was onto cleaning the seat belts. My seat belts are a bit dirty but overall in decent shape.
I used my laundry sink full of hot water and mixed a bit of TSP into it and let everything soak for a good 30 minutes.
After a light scrub it turned into this. Gross?
So I drained and rinsed everything and refilled the sink and repeated the process. Even after the second scrub down the water looked like this.
I got tired of scrubbing for tonight but I will soak them and scrub them one more time. I noticed after cleaning the seat belts that the black background inside the seat belt buttons smeared away. Most likely from the TSP and hot water solution used during the cleaning process. Looks like I will have to use my little detail paint brush and repaint the black backgrounds. Live and learn. Pretty sure a repro seat belt button doesn’t exist for this model of deluxe seat belts?
After they dried off a bit I hit them with some grade 0000 steel wool to scrub away some surface corrosion and then it was time for the bench buffer. Just hit the metal portions quickly with a loose wheel and white rouge to shine them up a bit. They turned out okay. Will look a lot better once the backgrounds of the button are painted with some fresh black paint.
Should I spray some WD40 or something equivalent in and behind the seat belt buttons to lubricate this mechanism or just leave alone?
No, they are not all the same. Steve has the delux belts which have sort of a square button decal which you can see in his photos. The other style of belts has a round button decal.
Yes correct. Check out page one of this thread. It was one of the first questions I asked when I started to learn more about the interiors of these cars. I’ve always seen the round button decal and never really noticed this style of seat belt. One thing I havent figured out yet with the deluxe seat belts is why the metal rear seat belt buckle is larger than the front seat metal belt buckle while the regular seat belt buckles are the same size for front and rear.
