My neighbour owns a Mitsubishi Starion which he's doing up as a drift car. Part of this work involves stripping the interior of useless things like sound-proofing and passenger seats, and he was going to take this to the tip. He let me have it for nothing, since it was useless to him and also covered in primer overspray from when he'd been doing some bodywork. I cleaned up as much of the paint off the leather as I could and gave it a thorough oiling as it was quite dry. It sat in my garage for a while.
This picture was taken before I started cleaning. You can see that the leather is quite discoloured.
A couple of months later, the company that rents the office next to my employer's office moved out and chucked everything they didn't want in a huge skip/container in the car park. I spent a few lunchbreaks climbing around in there taking things that looked useful/interesting - including two office chairs with bases which looked like they might be suitable for my hybrid chair project. The bases came home and I found that the mounting holes didn't line up at all with the mounting holes on the car seat. So they sat in the garage for a few more months.
My wife had mentioned the project to her friend Andy, who's a bit of a tinkerer. He offered to take the car seat and see if he could clean the rest of the paint off the leather. I loaded the seat into Hayley's car one night before she headed off to work. She snuck down in the morning and put one of the office seat bases in the car and got Andy to make up a subframe to allow the two to be fixed together.
On the day before my birthday, she came home from work and called me out to the car to help her lift out the cleaned car seat. When I opened the boot I saw a completed chair! All the controls still work - the gas lift works (though needs encouragement to go back up due to the heavy seat), both the base and the seat have their own recline mechanisms, the headrest and the bolsters are adjustable.
The seat still looks a bit green here. Over time it has gone back to black.
Big thanks to Andy for welding the subframe! Awesome birthday present!!
This picture was taken before I started cleaning. You can see that the leather is quite discoloured.
A couple of months later, the company that rents the office next to my employer's office moved out and chucked everything they didn't want in a huge skip/container in the car park. I spent a few lunchbreaks climbing around in there taking things that looked useful/interesting - including two office chairs with bases which looked like they might be suitable for my hybrid chair project. The bases came home and I found that the mounting holes didn't line up at all with the mounting holes on the car seat. So they sat in the garage for a few more months.
My wife had mentioned the project to her friend Andy, who's a bit of a tinkerer. He offered to take the car seat and see if he could clean the rest of the paint off the leather. I loaded the seat into Hayley's car one night before she headed off to work. She snuck down in the morning and put one of the office seat bases in the car and got Andy to make up a subframe to allow the two to be fixed together.
On the day before my birthday, she came home from work and called me out to the car to help her lift out the cleaned car seat. When I opened the boot I saw a completed chair! All the controls still work - the gas lift works (though needs encouragement to go back up due to the heavy seat), both the base and the seat have their own recline mechanisms, the headrest and the bolsters are adjustable.
The seat still looks a bit green here. Over time it has gone back to black.
Big thanks to Andy for welding the subframe! Awesome birthday present!!
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