More Back Seat Work

Dateline - 04/02/2017 - Over the week, I received my 9" electric carving knife and a large role of rebond foam, so I went to work turning the pink foam forms into soft foam seat cushions.  First though, I needed to created the metal backing plates.  I bought four pieces of 8" x 18" 22 gauge sheet metal at the hardware store.  Three of the four pieces needed to be cut to shape, so I created templates out of paper, transferred them to the metal, and got out the trusty saber saw.  Two hours later, I had all four metal frames ready to go.  They will need to be painted, but I will do that after I mount the rebond foam to them.

Creating the foam cushions was an easy, if somewhat slow process.  I bought both 2" and 1" foam so I was able to use the appropriate thickness that avoided a lot of piecing.  All the foam was glued together with 3M 77 adhesive.  The electric knife really made cutting the foam easy.  It just chops right through without complaint.  

I'm really glad I made all the pink foam forms ahead of time because I could really see how the layers fit together and could easily mark them out on the rebond.  That saved a lot of foam from being wasted! To do the other side, which is reversed, all I have to do it separate the layers of the forms and draw them upside down on rebond.  Should be pretty straight forward.

I got the back and two upright bolsters done before I called it a day.  Here are pictures of the work:

Note in the two bottom pictures you can see the bottom bolsters with the paper patterns I made for the upholstery which I mentioned in the last post.  I got all my tools for the upholstery work last week also, so I'm ready to go with that as soon as I get the foam done!

I've also worked on some of the remaining instrumentation.  The center "Information Center" piece has gone through lots of transitions.  I bought some black ABS and printed the information center again on the 3D printer.  Then, I tried out a method for "chroming" it using fingernail polish and rub on chrome flakes.  It had real promise, but it just has a little too much "glitter."  I'm still looking for a chrome method that will work.  I don't want to paint it black since all the other gauges have chrome bezels.  I may just have to sent it out to be chromed.  Considering the time and money I've already spent, it probably would have been cheaper to do it already!