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Oh well.  There were some on here that felt we just needed the general discussion board.  I find that I usually go there first when I stop by, and usually don't even make it to the others!

It shows Bobby. Otherwise you'd have put your truck seat thread in 'The Green Room' ;)

You have to weasel the bottom under the rubber and then pop the top in like mike says. A small flat head helps get it started if the rubber is really tight. I made a thread with a couple other tricks here- http://www.upholster.com/upholstery-forum/index.php?topic=9063.0

I really like those fittings Mike. They only came available to us the last year or two. They're as handy as they are spendy.

Rich asked me for a tutorial on facebook. Here's some pictures I have of the process. First the finished seat-


It started out as an old boat frame. Was about 40" between the bends. The bends were 8" radius. This was attempt #2, #1 broke at a snap hole that was in the frame. Had to start again with a bar without holes. I was guessing at 40" being enough I held a tape around me as a chair and it seemed to be a good number, and we had the bars laying around. To get the curve between the leg bends I put it in the crown-arch and ran it through, got to the end and tightened the nut a 1/4 turn and ran it through again. Did that many times. When it got close I man-handeled it to bring it closer together. Thats when I broke the first bar.

You can see my Fabrication Fluid in that shot. Took quite a few to get the job done.

The upper part was a straight bar bent in the same fashion with the crown-arch. In this shot I taped them together and tried to imagine it with foam on it. I pop riveted a small piece of aluminum to the upper bar and the lower bar to stabilize it. Then I made a quick paper pattern of the lower piece and cut a piece of HDPE plastic about 1/16" thick from the pattern. Then I put seam tape on the bar and stuck the plastic to it. I stapled the plastic to the plywood base and pop riveted the plastic to the bar. At this point it was very stable and made working with it easier. I did the same for the top piece.



The it only needed foam. I cut channels in the foam to allow for the thickness of the tubing. It was 3" super soft foam which made upholstering it difficult. Harder foam would have made it simpler.


Then I took some dust cloth and glued it to the foam and the frame to keep the foam in place and give a little more structure to the soft foam. Then I put 1/2" foam on top of the dustcloth. Then the pattern.


I was going to put a seam and a stretcher in where the lower bar went on the inside back, but I wanted the smooth look to match my boat (more on the boat at a later date) This also made the upholstery more difficult. Had I put in a stretcher I would have pop riveted velcro to the bar and sewed the other half to the stretcher multiple times. The stretcher would have needed to be shaped or cut every couple inches. I would've gone with the cuts to simplify it.

I don't have any sewing pictures as that was done by my wonderful and talented coworker. Turned out awesome any way. Here's the back-

When you see the boat it'll make sense. It looks so bitchin' I had to dress up to sit in it-

Neato! Any pics of it in the boat?

I once had to remake a bar and use those fittings because the fitting needed to pivot when the frame was folded forward. I measured up and put an 1/8" pop rivet where that groove is in the fitting. Had to be real careful measuring, and it didn't swivel quite as freely as the mondo-crimp June's talking about but it worked. If it didn't need to pivot I'd put a rivet in it any old place and be done.

If your BBQ cover is still fine I wonder if the customer used some weird waterproofing or treatment on it. I've seen people use armor all vinyl cleaner on their windows and it turned them to junk. Although I see covers come in looking like that one a lot. Especially on G3 boats. I've never used surlast, is that the stuff that looks like a gym bag with rubber on the inside?

I sew a piece of window material to the curtain zipper. This gives me a platform to tape the pattern to. Then I trace the teeth and mark the marks.

That's cheap with new wood mike. Too many t nuts.

I'd only use hidum on the outside back and staple mesh on the bottom of everything else. Maybe with a welt but never with hidum.

Pictures worth 1000 words. Exaggerated for effect-

We had to put a hole for a seatbelt in a pad we upholster for a roller coaster. Took a while to get them to look good.

You need to shape your border piece. It can't be a rectangle. Where it sews to the inside back it needs to be a curved line. This makes the border become more of a cone than a tube. Then you can pull against the cone to get it tight.

Nope Mike. No photo documentation. I didn't even like it in front of the shop.

I just had a guy at the shop who was booked for a convertible top, but couldn't afford it so wanted us to fix his 'bimini top' instead. When he shows up it turns out he has a convertible top with no frame and a boat with no snaps (it's about to be painted). You could smell from the bag it was in that it'd been freshly laundered and there were those snap extender things all over it. You could tell it never fit just by looking at it on the table. When you put it on the boat it looked like it belonged on a different boat. I bent a frame, jammed it in and made a god awful monstrous abomination of a canvas structure I've ever seen. We charged him but told him we'd take that off the top when he's got money. But I hope to god when people ask him about his top this summer he doesn't sing the praises of Peppy.

We buy remainders from a manufacturer.  We do a lot of furniture. We stock so much because we're about a 2 hour drive from the nearest fabric store.

We have a lot of weights. The rolls of Sampson are the best. We also have a bunch of tobacco tins filled with lead from back when the shop made downrigger balls. We also have some florescent light ballasts covered in tape. I don't like those ones but they are heavy and rectangular which can be handy. I just figured out what they actually were last year after I had to replace some ballasts at the shop. I don't imagine it's very healthy, it's why I use the rolls.

It was all screwed up for me too. For the last week actually. I could't even get the page to load till tonight. It must be something to do with Safari on my mac and Mikes iphone. I switched to yellow, and now it's fixed. I was one of the 2 people using the 'babylon' theme. I'm not a fan of the yellow.