RX300 Seat Renewed

 Being my first time to re-upholster a leather seat it took some time to figure out how this stuff works.  In retrospect it's logical, and when the seat goes back together you get why all the things within the seat are the way they are.  All the things within the seat work to make the finished look, feel, and functionality of the seat suit a need as a automotive seat.  You have creature comfort factors, anti-fatigue factors, safety factors, and most important some would say, looks...

 

A luxury car is supposed to have good looking everything.  The seats get scrutinized extra closely because you are in direct contact with them.  Well, after my RX300 got used as a work truck for more than a decade the driver seat was looking terrible.  The front passenger seat is not nearly so bad, and the back seats are hardly used because they are furled most of the time.  So the big final task that I had with the drivers seat was to remove the seat back skin from the replacement seat.  That means I had to totally disassemble another seat just to get the seat back skin.

I bought this replacement seat from a salvage yard to use in the RX300 while I was re-conditioning the original seat.  This took a lot longer than I expected.  So, above, is the replacement seat, disassembled, so that I could get the seat back skin.  Doing this for the second time took considerably less time, now that I know the construction of this seat.

I pulled both the front seats out of the RX300 which gave me an opportunity to do some deep cleaning.  I found a sub-woofer under the front passenger seat which I did not know was there.  This RX300 has the Premium Sound.  Having the seats removed allowed me to access a lot of areas I couldn't clean with the seats installed.  The whole passenger compartment is a lot cleaner now.

This is the seat back heater.  It is a lot simpler that the seat bottom heater.  It was easier to remove from the old seat skin, and easier to apply to the new seat skin.  It was a non-issue with the experience that I gleaned from re-upholstering the seat bottom.  Re-installing the Hog Rings in the seat back was also a lot easier now that I had a little experience with it.  Hog Rings work in a very specific way, and once you work with them a little you pick up their tricks.

This is one of my favorite features of the RX300 seat, above, the Lumbar Adjustment.  Over the years I had imagined how the Lumbar Adjustment works, and this isn't what I was thinking.  The way it does work is pretty logical.  There is a gear reduction motor that drives a crossbar into the Lumbar area of the seat.  When you push the control one way it drives this bar into your lower back, pushing the Lumbar Adjustment out.  When you push the control the other way it drives the Lumbar Adjustment back into the seat.  It is neat, and it is one of my favorite features of the RX300 seats.

OK, now the original seat is back in the RX300, with new leather seat skins, and it looks great.  The seat heater, as well as all the electromechanical controls all work.  The new seat bottom skin is a little off color, but that is a lot better that shredded seat skins covered with duct tape.  Plus I got to deep clean most of the passenger compartment, so it feels a lot better inside the RX300 now...