Homebuilt Seats

$120 worth of teperfoam from wicks


Fancy wedge cutting jig


Fist layers


Firm green foam where I will step into the plane


First side support pieces


Ready for the upholster! So from bottom to top its two layers of 1/4" high density green pvc foam(used for final height adjustments), one layer of firm green foam, two layers of medium blue foam, and one layer of soft pink foam. The hard PVC foam is great for final 1/4" adjustments because its about 1/3 the weight of temperfoam and can be ordered in various thicknesses. Everything is glued together with the spray glue thats recommended on the Wicks site. The sides were trimmed down with my bandsaw until everything was flush. It turns out that the foam is really easy to sand when its frozen. This was probably the only time during the build when I was hoping for OAT in the teens. It looks a bit dirty now, but I think it will look great when I get it back from the upholster.

nice. what are you going to do for the seat back?

I just started on my seats in my rocket, and I found the front seat back was a little too thick with with the blue and pink foam laminated together. So I let it sit outside on a table in the cold, and took an electric wood planer and thinned the seatback cushion down. It worked perfectly. I got my foam from seatfoam.com.

I was always told the best tool for carving the seat foam is an electric carving knife like you use on your turkey.

Ill be building the seatback in the same way. I plan on having no seatback when I wear a parachute for acro. An electric kitchen knife would have worked great if I didnt use the bandsaw. This foam is really easy to work with.

rph142 said:

Ill be building the seatback in the same way. I plan on having no seatback when I wear a parachute for acro. An electric kitchen knife would have worked great if I didnt use the bandsaw. This foam is really easy to work with.

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Rob, will you always be wearing a chute? I suspect not. Maybe, if you made a seatback pad that you could remove and install in seconds. Thank You Velcro.

Dave

Well here they are fresh out of the sewing machine...






WJ Auto Tops upholstered them from scratch without any patterns to work with. I highly recommend these guys for those of you that are in the philadelphia area.

Looks really good.. I'd be interested in what the upholsterer charges to cover it, because I plan on doing this as well to replace the seats in mine at some point.

They charged $500 after some haggling. The embroidery was from a separate shop and cost $25. Since it was such a small job, they worked on it during the downtime between their larger restoration projects. If they had a pattern to work with it would have been completed much faster and for a lot less.

Seat Patterns.

rph142 said:

They charged $500 after some haggling. Since it was such a small job, they worked on it during the downtime between their larger restoration projects. If they had a pattern to work with it would have been completed much faster and cheaper.

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I'm thinking of taking the same route and not wanting to leave too much open to the interpretation of the seamstress, I've been searching for suitable patterns. Does anyone know of a source of patterns that could be made to work on a 9a?