Hours to install interior

[ghenne]

Given a ready made kit from a company like GAHH, how many hours should it take an experienced upholstery guy to install a leather interior, including carpets?

A couple of us are looking for someone in Toronto to do this for us: their time quotes are wildly different. What have you seen where you are?

[Benz Dr.]

Do you mean everything? As in every part covered with leather?
I would think that it's not a couple of days and more like a week or two. The kit you buy only has the seats and door panels sewn up. I'm pretty sure you have to cut and fit almost everything else. Even the carpet requires some triming and there's a lot of stuff to remove and put back together - it's not a small job.

  Of course, some guys work faster than others but this isn't something where faster gives you something better. Body work is the same way - lots of diffrent prices for the same thing with very diffrent results.

[Garry]

My interior upholsterer had the car for two months but I estimated that he took between 55 - 60+ hours to do the lot, that was after I had everything apart for him and the windscreen out to do the dash. That was the 'everything' leather

[franjo_66]

My interior guy took 45 hours to do the whole interior. That included fitting new seat pads, minor repairs on seat frame, fitting seat covers, carpet fitting, dash retrimming, soft top lid retrimmed plus all the kick panels, rear parcel area, windlace, etc. It certainly helped having good quality carpet set and seat covers. There was minimal trimming needed there.

Also my guy has done many interiors on old Mercs and knows the ins and outs. That also helps!

[Neil Thompson]

I know it's probably been asked many times and if I look back I'll propably find it, but can anyone reccomend a good trimmer in the UK who knows our cars well? mine is all original but tired in places and following dipping and painting I want it back to as near original as possible using as much of the original trim/carpets as possible. D Class seem to come up in the MB Gazette often, any experience here?

Neil

[zoegrlh]

I did my own, took a couple of months.  I was not in a rush, and yes, you have to cut all the pieces not sewn (seats, door panels).  Got my leather and carpet from GAHH.  Leather came with seat sewn, and door leather sewn, and 1/2 of cow hide rolled up.  Carpets came ready to fit, and I must say they fit perfect.  Door panels have to be glued to door panel boards.  The hardest and longest job to do is to remove the old leather and carpeting, seats out and disassembled.  I bought new seat pads too from MB, they were still available two years ago.  DON'T replace seat leather without replacing pads, also check your seat springs.  Anyway it is a time consuming process.  If you want to try to do this yourself, please read my topic that I presented at Blacklick 2009, and if you have any questions, just contact me.
Bob

[ghenne]

please read my topic that I presented at Blacklick 2009, and if you have any questions, just contact me.
Bob

I found that, but I am having trouble viewing it. I'll check with the moderators.

[Peter van Es]

Weird, it looks like the Shockwave embedded flash player now shows nothing... and all the text has been deleted...

Go to the Wiki page (http://www.sl113.org/wiki/PUB/Upholstery), wait a little, then click in the white space under the heading once, and the first slide will appear. Click again for further slides...

but all the text is gone. I'll see if I still have the presentations and if I can upload them as pdf's or in some other format...

Peter

[ghenne]

Good - I'm glad you're seeing that too. I tried on both Mac and PC -  Chrome, Safari and IE. I even looked at the underlying HTML for the problem.

What is the original format of the content? It would be nice not to be dependent on Flash. If it is video, let's get it on YouTube or Vimeo.