A Seat is Covered and Sound is Deadened!

This weekend I made a lot of progress on the van's interior. First of all I got the sound deadening completed for the front cab. Its too bad that stuff wouldn't really work so well as a usable surface because I think it looks kind of cool in that a satellite just crash landed in the front of my Vanagon kind of a way. Here's a picture.




I also got one of my bucket seats finished. Getting the upholstry installed was an epic battle. The guy at SewFine told me that it was going to be a wrestling match and would feel really hard but in the end I would have a nice looking finished seat and he was right. First of all it took a lot longer than I was originally expecting. I had to strip the seat down to the frame to start things off. I was a little surprised by the amount of surface rust on the frame so I decided to refinish the seats. I used my angle grinder to get most of the surface rust off the frame and then just used some Rustoleum satin black paint to cover them. I'm a little concerned about that though because the finish isn't all that hard and I'm afraid I'll just end up with more rust but I talk more about that later. After the parts dried it was time to get the new covers on. The base wasn't too bad to get on but the back was REALLY hard. Not only was it a tight fit but I also had to make sure the foam stayed in position while I pulled the cover on. After that I actually had a tough time getting the seat back reattached to the base. It just takes a bit of a trick to make it happen and I'll cover that later. Anyway, I'm really happy with how the seat turned out. Here is a picture of my new seat next to my old one. Oh and that old one is the "good" one of the pair.




I also got my new carpet install underway. First of all, putting in a carpet kit is non-trivial if you are anal about how it looks. I'm about hald way done and I'm fairly confident that it is going to look good when I'm done but it is really stressful to actually do it. All I can think about while installing it is how mad I'm going to be if it looks like crap and I'm constantly doing stupid things like getting glue on the surface of the carpet. It's really not that hard of a job but if you are a perfectionist about things like installing van interiors then it is stressful. Here is carefully angled shot to try to give an idea about what it is going to look like when I'm done.