RX300 New Leather Seat Skin

 So I bought an aftermarket replacement seat skin for my RX300 driver seat.  In theory this is the correct repair.  They original seat skin was destroyed, and you should replace the damaged part, not cover it up.  There are a lot of cheap over-cover type seat covers.  I think they all look terrible because they don't fit correctly, and slip around when you sit on them.  The correct course of action here is to replace the original seat skin with a proper replacement part.

Now this was not at all as easy as I had imagined.  First the new, leather seat skin is fitted to the seat cushion, which means when it is installed it will be very tight.  This leaves no room for getting the seat skin on to the seat.  The seat skin needs to be stretched before it is installed on the seat, and then it can relax to fit the seat tightly.  Typically a upholstery shop is going to use steam to warm up the seat cover, make it more pliable, and be able to stretch the seat skin fairly easily to install the seat cover.  Well, one tool that I did not have was the steam gun, and it made this job a lot more difficult.

Another aspect to this task was to install the seat heater in the new seat skin.  The seat heater is a simple fabric form that holds a heater wire.  This wire snakes around the area of the seat cover where you are making contact with the seat.  It is a single contiguous wire that runs around the area of the seat cover.  The heater is attached to the seat cover with a spray adhesive, so it was fairly simple to remove it from the old seat cover.

I picked a medium strength spray adhesive from the hardware store to install the seat heater in the new seat cover.  Above you can see the spray adhesive, the Hog Ring Pliers, and Hog Rings.  I had some difficulty finding the Hog Rings.  They are not standard hardware store hardware, and I had to get them from the Interwebz.  So, I positioned the seat heater in the new seat cover, and adhered it in sections, carefully.  I also made sure that it was fully adhered to the seat cover before trying to install the seat cover.

You are really going to wrestle with the seat skin to get it on to the seat, and you don't want the seat heater slipping around under the seat cover when you are trying to install it.  Now for the Hog Rings.  The Hog Rings are what pulls the seat cover down into the seat cushion.  This makes that nice fitment, and prevents the seat cover from slipping around on top of the seat.  Hog Rings are the hardware that holds upholstery together.  The seat itself is a wire frame, springs, and foam cushions.  The Hog Rings hold the seat cover on to the seat.  Some of these Hog Rings are in very difficult places to access, especially the deep crevices in the middle of the seat.  It took a lot of strength, and patients to get these Hog Rings in there.  Also, I had a lot of misfires because this is my first time installing Hog Rings.  I probably used 20 Hog Rings to install 8.

So, I did get the new seat cover installed.  Is it perfect?  No...  It's my first leather upholstery experience, and I learned a lot with this experience.  It does look a lot better that the mess that the old seat cover was.  I really need the steam tool to make it look better.  When you pull off the old seat cover you should steam the seat cushions to revitalize them a little.  Then you need to steam the new seat cover before you try to install it.  With the steam you should get much better fitment.  OK, the next step in this process it to remove the seat back cover from the replacement seat in the RX300.  Then I'll install the seat back heater from the original seat into the seat back cover from the replacement seat.  Then I'll install the replacement seat back cover, and heater from the original seat on to the original seat from the RX300.  Are you following?  The end result will be the original seat from the RX300 will have new seat skins, and look a lot better than it has looked lately.