My drivers seat has a small tear on the left side where it holds you in place…plus the padding is completely shot.
Is it cheaper to get it re-upholstered or buy a used good seat?
What’s the average price to get the seat restored anyway?
[QUOTE=azzurribaggio;1944568]Is it cheaper to get it re-upholstered or buy a used good seat?
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Depends on how much the shop is charging and depends on how much the used seat is. Really shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
Call local shops and ask.
So I went to two shops and one quoted me $180, but the material and color of the fabric will not be exact since he said he can’t get that same material anymore and he can’t compensate for 15 years worth of fading.
The second shop quoted me $120, but gave me the option of just re padding the
left side of the seat and re-stitching the rip on the same section for $100. This last option at least lets me keep the stock cloth on the seat, albeit having a small stitch where the rip was.
I’ve never had upholstery work done on cars so I can’t gauge if these are decent prices for this sort of work.
Comments welcome.
I took an extra pass side top skin and reinstalled it on the drivers side. You can barely tell, and it beats getting little foam chunks everywhere in my car. Plus I got to wash it while it was off. I was going to dye all of the seats, but decided I would likely regret that in the future.
Local shops were quoting me $100-$150 just to take an exisiting seat skin and put it on a different seat… ridiculously expensive!
I just replaced the upper half, and it takes some patience; however, it didn’t cost me a dime. You have to work the cover off while unhooking the bungee straps for lack of a better term. There are also some metal loops that I just snipped with side cutters and then made new ones when reinstalling.
The metal clips are called “hog rings”. If you get new rings you can use hog ring pliers to install them.
So guys, do the quotes I have seem high or right within the going rate for the job I need? I’m opting more for the re-pad and stitch of the rip since it’ll let me keep the same cloth, but I wish the quote was a bit lower for that option since for the second shop it’s a $20 difference between the repair & stitch versus the repair and re-upholster.
the reason its only $20 difference is cuz either way its still a good amount of labor on their part… repairing and stitching just that left side bolster will need some good stitching to get it to look right and natural. it would be much different compared to ur grandmother stitching it up. they charge kinda high cuz well… some of us don’t have the skills.
Just a word on stitching the seat, I did that a couple times in the past and it never seemed to last that long. I would get new seats if I were to shell out the cash on them at all. Well that and manual seatbelts again.
Did a shop do the work for you, or did you do it yourself?
The only things I have ever done at a shop were tint, paint (no prep just spray), and alignment (couple times even that required my assistance due to inexperience employees). The problem was that I would patch the area and it would just wear out around that. The fabric was just too worn. Its certainly something I would not pay for on 20 year old seats.
Ah gotcha, I see what you mean. I went down to Acura and they said the cloth portion for the bottom half of the seat is $400…for one.
get another seat that matches urs. piece together the skins, using the best of the two per section… so by doing it this way, u go with the original seams, and u aint’ doing just a patch job. once u got a complete skin that looks HOPEFULLY a lot better, then u go and put that on the better of the two seats.
will still be a bit pricey, but maybe just getting the seat refoamed/padded will be much cheaper. thats if both seats are pretty shitty and have tore up padding/foam.