A couple of weeks ago I was in Sydney and boozing with Boris at Vintage Vee-Dub supplies (http://www.vintageveedub.com.au/) when I remembered he had high quality reproduction mesh-grey vinyl available. So off we went to the workshop and after some head scratching, cut off 3 or 4 meters (what ever it was, it wasn't quite enough as it turns out...) and with that sorted, back to Adelaide I went with it on the airplane.
I then took my original front and rear seats off to Jeff's Trim shop where Jeff got out his machete and reduced the trim to it's basic vinyl pieces ready for me to go and sort out the next step.
Next for me was a visit to a local shop I have used in the past to recover my original rear arm rests in the notchback, Dash-Original (http://www.dashoriginal.com.au/). I handed them the original sections of mesh grey vinyl as well as the new roll of Boris supplied (TMI) mesh grey vinyl. The fine folk there said to leave it with them for a few days and the results would be epic!
So what did they do? Well, using this fabulous old Japanese machine:
Which heats up or does something magic to the aluminum strip, it creates the original style heat seamed lines in the vinyl exactly as VW did it back in 1964 (but on a much smaller scale now).
The end result was perfect and I can not thank Vintage Vee-Dub Supplies, Jeff's Trim Shop or Dash Original enough.
I will be getting the last few things in order soon before it all goes back to Jeff to sew it all up into something resembling a set of front and rear seats (the original rear has an arm rest too which is way rare here in Australia).
