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Cloth Upholstery
About fabric seat upholstery; I once spotted a MkII in a Home Depot parking lot with gorgeous fabric covered seats, and waited for him to come out so I could ask him where he got them. He just looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language, then I realized that he wasn't a gearhead and the seats were in that condition when he bought the car.
It turns out that if you want to reupholster the factory seats in fabric, you'd have to have an upholstery shop do it from scratch and it won't be cheap.
After visiting two Katskin installers and a custom upholstery shop, I ended up going with Leatherseats.com, and will then have the upholstery shop do the actual installation as some seat pad rebuilding will likely have to be done. I've seen some installations people have done at home and, while they didn't look bad, the upholstery didn't seem to lay quite right on the seats.
I wanted my seats to resemble the factory tan as much as possible, but also wanted the seat center section to be in suede (which is always really a synthetic suede, as there's no such thing as automotive grade real suede) to keep them from being too "slippery." Both Katskin and Leatherseats.com had "Bisque" leather, which I thought was the best match of the factory tan, but Leatherseats.com was the only one who had a suede that came close to matching. It's a custom order suede called "Latte." I'll be getting the door panel inserts done in "Latte" suede too, and will get both the seat inserts and the door panel inserts perforated to duplicate the factory look.
I just placed my order, and will be getting it in about four weeks.
For what it's worth, one of the two Katskin installers I visited (Classic Soft Trim) seemed to really know their business and had more color choices than the other one, but didn't have what I was looking for. The other installer didn't impress me at all. I even found a Katzkin supplier who'd just provide me with the upholstery, but they still didn't have the suede color I was looking for. I thought the guy at Leatherseats.com was very professional and helpful in finding something that'd work for me.
James
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