Step Two: Replace seat covers and detail the car (Aug 2016)
After some weeks, I received a letter from ICBC indicating the car had failed to obtain Collector Car status. The reason
given in the letter was that the seats were torn and needed to be recovered. There were some other issues as noted in returned
photos.
In addition to the torn seats, the photos indicated the level of detailing on the car was not up to ICBC standards. Areas to
be detailed included the rear deck and the engine compartment. I talked to my neighbor Bill, and he suggested using spray wash
on the engine and then just vacuuming out the car. He said "make it like you want to show it in a car show".
The big issue was the seats. I bought new covers for the seats some years ago, as well as new rubber diaphrams that go
under the seat bottoms. Time to get to work.
I removed the seats from the car, then removed the backs from the seat bottoms. There are a number of useless videos on
youtube pretending to show how to recover MGB seats, but every one suffers from the same flaw: they skip the actual installation
of the seat covers!!! They spend 10-20 minutes covering removal of seats and covers, and fussing with new foam, but then *MAGIC*
they are bolting the seats back in. I even called a couple of auto restorers and asked how they do seats, only to be told "we
send them out to an upholsterer". How nice for you.
In the end I just decided to reverse the procedure I used to remove the old covers. It took about 2 hours but in the end
I had a quite nice job. It took 2 more hours to reinstall the seats as the driver's seat rails decided to be difficult. With
a bit of grease and moving the adjustment lever I finally managed to get the seats installed. They look great!
In the end I didn't take any photos of the actual seat re-covering process, nor the seat installation. I guess I now enter
the ranks of the useless folks on the internet. My only difference: I didn't bother to make a video of me magically doing the
seats.
With seats in place, I bought a can of spray-on engine cleaner (really just pressurized varsol), cleaned the engine and
vacuumed out the car completely. With everything looking great, I took new photos of the car for ICBC and prepared to resubmit
my applciation.
|