Better Beaters - Building Cars and Daily Drivers

I almost lost sight of my goal and succumbed to a distraction.

These are 17 inch. XJR wheels.

So I settled for another distraction, one that was much cheaper.

While cruising through my local CL I stumbled upon a listing for several sets of Jaguar alloy wheels. 

 There was a set of rare XJR wheels and a set of 16 inch turbine wheels which would fit my XJS. They were offered at a bargain price of 400.00 a set! I'd seen some XJR wheels on Ebay offered for 275.00 a piece! So it was a great bargain and an opportunity for someone looking for some wheels. That person really isn't me. I like the 16 inch dimpled alloys on my XJ6, I prefer the non-chromed units and have found another one at Pick and Pull I am only lacking two more for a complete set.  The XJR wheels make any XJ look like a highway tough guy, but that isn't the look that I'm going for. 

The 16 in. wheels for the XJS would be nice but I'm really a fan of the flat faced "aero" units used on the first face lift models. 

I'm not really looking for wheels at all, but these just came along. Luckily I avoided the temptation to buy. Why would I want to buy something that I really don't need? Just to cheer myself up and feel like I was doing something to make some progress. 

It's a bad idea to buy too much stuff ahead of your actual progress. For one thing, you deplete your funds and second, if you bail out of your project you are to just going to give away the extra parts as a sales inducement. I've heard of this happening to DIY home re-modelers, they snap up a good buy well before they are going to use it, sometimes the expenses are enough to doom the project if they run into financial trouble. 

So I thought that I'd amuse myself with something cheap, instead.

I found these seat covers while I was checking out the floor mat section at my local O'Reilly's.  What caught my eye initially was the color combination. Tan and black. Then the texture of the perforated and smooth vinyl. The box also claims that these are designed to fit bolstered seats. I wasn't expecting miracles, but they were relatively cheap, 14.00 ea. so I decided to take a chance. It might also scratch my itch for doing something constructive with the car.

The driver's seat bottom cushion is in very poor shape.The front of the cushion is cracked with sections of super dry leather broken off. The sides of the seat cushion are also in bad shape. There was no chance that I could soften the leather enough to stitch any patches on. It would be like trying to stitch together two strips of bacon.

There was no real need to remove the seat but I did it anyway, believe me, I wont do that on the passenger's seat! I took the opportunity to remove the plastic cover for the reclining lever and even the seat bottom hinge, all in an effort to gain a better fit. I also won't be doing that again!

Unlike every other manufacturer Jaguar doesn't use captive nuts for the seat bolts. The advice on the forum was to glue the nuts in place by reattaching the seat bolts. A good idea that I also ignored. I thought that it would be faster just to pop them in and out, wrong! 

I ended up taping the nut to a strip of cardboard to help position the nuts in the proper location, it would have been better to glue them in place. There's plenty of nice wool carpeting under the seat, which sits low to the floor. 

This idea was only partly effective.

Here is how the seat cover looked when fitted. Still kind of puffy looking. I thought that I could take some of the slack out of the fit by tying a cord that would pull the material into the headrest gap a bit.

It tightens up the fit a bit. I went a bit too tight the first time. I found that out when I tried sitting in seat and it tore the bottom seam.

It can only stretch so much.

A curved needle and thread was used to sew up the seam. I would have used a similar needle to sew in patches on the seat upholstery. I made sure that I didn't tighten up the back panel too much this time.

The installation is finished. Hopefully the vinyl will eventually smooth into a "proper" fit. Any similarity to an old duffle bag stuffed with dead monkeys is purely coincidental!

Am I satisfied with the results? Not really, a set of lambswool fleece seat covers would probably have fit much  better. I had the set that I had used on my '70 Mustang, but gave them to my Son to use on his Nissan Pathfinder. I know that there are better fitting covers available for considerably more money, but as I said, I shouldn't be spending any money on things that aren't essential. 

Maybe the fit will improve with use?