C3 Seat Cover Rebuilding Article
Owners of 68 to 73(?) Corvettes with ComfortWeave standard seat covers have or will notice a yellow pollen-like dust that accumulates on the seats and keeps on reappearing after each cleaning. This will happen to even a low mileage well kept survivor car with an otherwise perfect original interior. The yellow dust is degraded foam rubber seeping out of the Comfort Weave vinyl cloth. It is not from the large seat foams that are more easily replaceable, but from the scrim foam which is made into the seat covers to form the pleats. To add injury to insult for C3 owners, there are no reproduction seat covers that use real ComfortWeave cloth. The reproductions have a pattern pressed into solid vinyl cloth that closely approximates the ComfortWeav e look, but is not the real thing.
In my case, I bought real GM seat covers in the mid-70s when I decided I would keep my 70 LT-1 for a long time. I had no premonition of the foam rubber problem, but thought they would eventually look worn. By the mid-90s, I started to notice the dust that wouldn't stay away. I figured it was time to open the box of 2 seat backs and 2 seat bottoms that I had ordered from the Chevy dealer so many years earlier. I was worried that the new GM pieces may have also degraded in the box, but the new covers, marked 1975, were perfect because the pleats were formed with a spongy cloth instead of the degraded foam rubber. Clever GM knew that the early seat covers were no good and fixed the problem on 75 and perhaps earlier Corvettes whose seat were otherwise identical to 70's. However, the joke was still on me because the 20 year unopened box contained 3 bottoms and 1 back to my dismay, and I could not replace one of the seat backs.
A friend gave me this attached article about how to rebuild my original seat back, and I finally got up the nerve to try it.
I had a good result doing this rebuild on my original seat back, but it is time consuming and would be expensive if you wanted a shop to do it for you. One of pictures I attached shows the hardened, cracking and powdering piece of scrim foam used to form one of the interior pleats of my seat back so you can understand the degradation of this stuff. It is called "scrim" foam because the foam it attached to a thin cloth.
If you look at the picture of the inside of the whole seat back, you will see 8 interior pleats and 2 long side pleats. The interior pleats are formed by cloth pockets which contain a strip of scrim foam with its attached cloth just below the cloth that forms the pocket. Both pieces of cloth look the same. If you CAREFULLY cut thru both pieces of cloth of the long interior pleats where the pleat ends in the center of the seat back, you can sometimes pull the scrim foam out mostly whole like in the first photo. At the smaller interior pleats, you have to cut the back to back cloth pieces at both ends and scrim foam probably won't come out in one piece. The hardest foam to get out is in the side pleats. Unlike the center pleats, the cloth you see is actually the backing of the scrim foam and it must be preserved as well as possible. You have to slit it at both ends and scrap the foam off of it with a long dull screwdriver or other tool of you choice, sucking the pieces out with a shop vac and long thin attachment (I found one on Amazon). At some point I also found it useful to use the shop vac to blow crunched up foam out of the pleat. It is hard to keep from tearing the thin cloth, but you can hand sew the backing of the new scrim foam to the edges of the scrim cloth to make repairs. Attached are pictures showing the rebuilt seat back cover with the new pink scrim foam stuffed in, and the finished seat back. I hope these notes add to your understanding of the attached article.
In my case, I bought real GM seat covers in the mid-70s when I decided I would keep my 70 LT-1 for a long time. I had no premonition of the foam rubber problem, but thought they would eventually look worn. By the mid-90s, I started to notice the dust that wouldn't stay away. I figured it was time to open the box of 2 seat backs and 2 seat bottoms that I had ordered from the Chevy dealer so many years earlier. I was worried that the new GM pieces may have also degraded in the box, but the new covers, marked 1975, were perfect because the pleats were formed with a spongy cloth instead of the degraded foam rubber. Clever GM knew that the early seat covers were no good and fixed the problem on 75 and perhaps earlier Corvettes whose seat were otherwise identical to 70's. However, the joke was still on me because the 20 year unopened box contained 3 bottoms and 1 back to my dismay, and I could not replace one of the seat backs.
A friend gave me this attached article about how to rebuild my original seat back, and I finally got up the nerve to try it.
I had a good result doing this rebuild on my original seat back, but it is time consuming and would be expensive if you wanted a shop to do it for you. One of pictures I attached shows the hardened, cracking and powdering piece of scrim foam used to form one of the interior pleats of my seat back so you can understand the degradation of this stuff. It is called "scrim" foam because the foam it attached to a thin cloth.
If you look at the picture of the inside of the whole seat back, you will see 8 interior pleats and 2 long side pleats. The interior pleats are formed by cloth pockets which contain a strip of scrim foam with its attached cloth just below the cloth that forms the pocket. Both pieces of cloth look the same. If you CAREFULLY cut thru both pieces of cloth of the long interior pleats where the pleat ends in the center of the seat back, you can sometimes pull the scrim foam out mostly whole like in the first photo. At the smaller interior pleats, you have to cut the back to back cloth pieces at both ends and scrim foam probably won't come out in one piece. The hardest foam to get out is in the side pleats. Unlike the center pleats, the cloth you see is actually the backing of the scrim foam and it must be preserved as well as possible. You have to slit it at both ends and scrap the foam off of it with a long dull screwdriver or other tool of you choice, sucking the pieces out with a shop vac and long thin attachment (I found one on Amazon). At some point I also found it useful to use the shop vac to blow crunched up foam out of the pleat. It is hard to keep from tearing the thin cloth, but you can hand sew the backing of the new scrim foam to the edges of the scrim cloth to make repairs. Attached are pictures showing the rebuilt seat back cover with the new pink scrim foam stuffed in, and the finished seat back. I hope these notes add to your understanding of the attached article.
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