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Restoring the upholstery of a classic car

Vital information for upholstery work in modern vehicles

Upholstery Journal | April 2008

by Rose St. John

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The project was simple: Restore a 1953 Porsche 356 1500 Super to original condition. I had never worked on a car interior before, but that fact didn’t deter Bill Garvey, the Porsche’s owner, or Ken Pettit, the electrical and engine man (both for whom I have done boat canvas work), from asking me to do this job. Al Craig, the painter and body guy, after watching my work, told me that I should work on this Porsche. But I don’t do cars.

It wasn’t as much the Porsche as the team that made me sign up for this challenge. Garvey was great at researching; he even found original factory pictures of the interior. Pettit was meticulous in everything. Craig was experienced in all aspects of restoration, and he believed in me.

The project seemed easy enough: Two front seats, one spring tie-down, a back fold-down seat and backseat pad, five side panels. Oh, and the headliner, which wasn’t there but a kit was on its way.

I took the pieces to my shop, dissected and documented. I measured and took digital pictures of everything. I took the decks off the frames layer by layer, first the fabric, then the filling and the burlap. I sanded, primed and then painted the frame that held the bronze coil springs with two coats of Rustoleum.

The seat backs were made the same, including hand stitching. Garvey wanted everything back, so I saved all I could and photographed the rest.

The side panels were in much better shape: corduroy and muslin with rag wool filling.

A pre-fabbed interior seat cushion kit was planned to cover the hand stitching and the work I finished in muslin. The seat patterns matched the originals perfectly, and the workmanship was second to none. The vinyl, however, was poor quality and ripped at any attempt to hand stitch. I finally machine-stitched some muslin to the inside edge to blanket-stitch it to the edge roll. Never cheap on the quality of the goods; it only costs in labor and time later.

I returned the seat bottoms to the shop and installed the carpets, which I found easier than expected. It took a lot of contact cement, so I used a respirator and goggles. The carpet took shape much better when it was wet from the outside. A water squirt bottle loosened up the stiff back just enough to push the carpet into shape. Cutting and splicing carpet pieces forgives mistakes; just make sure the grain is the same overall. A good regulator or ice pick will allow for any grain adjustments. I referred to the original factory photos for much of the detail. Finishing was important. The tails on the carpet pieces tucked in and hid nothing when left raw. Details were important.

I made the mistake of not allowing for the placement of the backseat side panels when I first laid the carpet in the back. I took them back up to install the padded side panels later, twice.

The front seats were done, the carpet was laid in the back and the side panels were installed. The headliner trim was padded and wrapped with remnants of the headliner...almost. There wasn’t quite enough, and I questioned whether the headliner would fit. We gathered around the Porsche, measured the headliner and agreed it was too small. We sent it back to California. Weeks later, a new headliner arrived with a note: “Measure again, this is the right headliner for this make Porsche,” signed, No Love, Calif. I knew it wouldn’t fit, but, if the pros say it’s so... I wrapped the window trim with small pieces of scrap salvage. This headliner had string sewn into a channel hem that, in a perfect world, would slip into the lip on the inside top of the window trim. Not necessarily so.

I asked Craig if there was any headliner from the original deconstruction. He gave me a piece, and there was the key to the whole headliner.

I had worked this interior enough to learn that it was efficient, simple and everything had a purpose. I held the piece up near the window trim, and as I thought about it, the piece wedged itself between the roof and the inside lip of the trim channel. I realized the secret was a one-inch wide piece of hard cardboard sewn to the edge of the headliner in six-inch sections. There were no strings attached to this headliner, just cardboard battens that wedged themselves in place and held the headliner taught. It installed in a few minutes, fit perfectly and was painless.

Later, Bill took a good look at the red vinyl seats, got the saddest expression on his face and asked me what I thought.

“I think it’s the worst material I have ever seen,” was my reply. “I doubt they paid two dollars a yard for it and if they did, they were robbed.

“Really?” he asked, realizing it was junk material.

I looked him right in the eye. “I’ll get you the corduroy and channel it up,” I said. He smiled from ear to ear and told me to do it. I went to Fabric Row in Philadelphia and found corduroy with the right wale and colors. Until I showed it to Garvey, I didn’t know that the grey headliner and the red corduroy were his racing colors.

Sewing channels is never as much fun as sewing channels in corduroy. Even the slightest slip of the fabric looks huge on the face of the finished piece. My solution was double-sided tape. I taped the channels until I got used to sewing the wale to muslin. I used an old Singer machine instead of an industrial machine because it made a better stitch, and I used a lighter upholstery thread than what I usually work with.

After it was all sewn and done, it was worth it. The interior scored 10 of 10 from the Porsche Club, and I received an IAA Outstanding Achievement Award from IFAI. Not bad for a rookie’s first car.

Rose St. John is from Expert Upholstery, Greenwich, N.C.

The battered seats were in a dusty but organized pile.
The frames were wood, and bronze coil springs were intertwined, requiring minimal tying on the deck to pull it in 10 inches from the front edge.
I wrote exact measurements on tape over the roll pleats, and documented everything down to stitches in an inch and corduroy wales in a pleat.
I rewrapped the deck coils in synthetic burlap. The insides of the seats are all cotton, horse hair and muslin—no foam was used.
The front edge roll on the seat deck had to be replaced. The original was sewn into the deck, and fibers inside the seats turned to powder. It was messy and smelly.
The purpose of these shots was to historically save how the inside of the seats were made.
They were in excellent shape, but were not stable enough to use in the reupholstered seats. In their place went some of the original rag filling, horsehair and cotton.
The muslin edge sewn onto the seat deck was hand-whipped to the edge roll. I reused the rag filling from the old channels and freshened up the edges with a little cotton.
The seat cover pinned down for placement. The seats were already made up in muslin, so rewrapping them in the vinyl and corduroy was easy. I even used some of the original tacks.
The seat covers’ first fitting. This was pulled in tighter for a final fit. Remember, no hog rings were used and everything was hand-stitched. The stitching is true, to a quarter of in inch, throughout the interior.
The finished headliner, created from a six-inch scrap piece from the original. The scrap was a piece of hard cardboard in the shape of the rear window curve, six inches long, one inch wide, and sewn to it was a frayed piece of the original headliner.
he backseat without the drop-down backrest installed. It helps to be limber and tiny when working on sports car interiors.
Because the machine used to first sew this piece was too heavy and puckered the seams on the corduroy, this piece was resewn on an old Singer tailoring machine, which eliminated all pucker.
The finished backseat of the 1953 Porsche.