I have a couple of chairs I want to reupholster. One is the General Fireproofing rolling chair and the other is a Good Form side chair. They both are stamped mid-50s and have the original perforated vinyl.
The brown one has damaged vinyl, so I'm considering leather for it.
The office chair is a very dark green. I thought it was black until I scrubbed the armrests.
All the diy reupholstery jobs I've seen on these don't look good. The bottoms never follows the contours of the seat like the originals. Any ideas on the way do this? Should I glue the foam to the seat pan to get the shape? Then would leather mold to that? or need to be glued to the foam? What kind of foam? Or maybe the old ones just ended up that way?
On the office chair, the vinyl doesn't seem too bad. I'd like to reuse it, but replace the foam properly like the other one. Any tips on getting the old vinyl loose without tearing it up?
I've reupholstered a lot of...
I've reupholstered a lot of these---maybe 14 so far. Mine had at least three different styles of backs.
To get the seat contours as neat and precise as the originals, you have to use fabric that is thin and tightly woven. I did all of mine in Unika Vaev "Wink" and "Look", which are very durable damask weaves that are thin and easy to work with. If you go with leather, find a hide that is thin enough to give you that knife edge you need on the backs. I think a lot of people use fabric or leather that's just too thick. Plus, even with the right stuff you have to really work to get the edges and corners neat.
You may have also seen chairs redone in vinyl. Vinyl's actually really hard to work with, in my opinion! You can stretch it but it springs right back as soon as you let go. It also tears way more readily than leather. Plus, the stuff available now isn't like what was used on the Goodform chairs. They had something thinner and maybe more composite-like.
I'm using the term fabric here to mean either fabric or leather unless otherwise stated.
Anyway---the originals did use a lot of glue, as I recall. There are also a lot of tabs punched in the metal seat base that hold the fabric edges down. Pry these up with a flathead screwdriver ONLY as much as you need to get the fabric out. They will break if you're not careful. Replace the foam with latex foam if possible--you'll have to order it online from someplace like foamorder.com and it costs more than polyfoam that you can find locally, but it's far superior and you don't want to redo these later because cheap foam has gotten all mashed down! They're really a pain to do!
The backs just have a thin layer of batting, no foam, if I remember correctly. And I think the fabric is glued down, but do not use glue on the face at all. (Glue should be contact cement--horrible fumes, so good ventilation is a must. Use it only where it cannot stain through to any visible areas over time.)
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Try to taper batting and foam to the edges or just over the edges a tiny bit but keep bulk to an absolute minimum. The key to a neat finish is smoothing the fabric as evenly as possible and getting the tension perfect all the way around so that there are no big creases or folds on the corners. This takes a lot of patience. You'll have to redo some of the clips.
If you use leather, you will have to notch it at the corners to get rid of bulk so that it will fold around nicely. Notch conservatively, never going so far that the cut shows on the outside. Better to cut too little and have to cut a tiny bit more than to cut a little too much and have it look like crap!
The backs are especially hard to get perfect, and they really do have to be JUST so or you will not be able to get them back on the frame. I cussed a LOT when doing the backs. They are held to the frame on a couple of integral clips and some set screws at the bottom. There can't be any extra bulk at all or you will not be able to fit them on those clips. Pain in the A**.
Some backs are upholstered on both sides; other chairs have fabric in front and metal in back. If you have fabric on both sides, the outside back is usually a piece of thin cardboard with fabric glued directly to it, edges trimmed even with the cardboard rather than wrapped around to the back. I reused mine. It was hard to get them back in place without messing up the edges, though.
I think that's about it, but if you have any questions, lemme know! I LOVE these chairs. I have one more steno type that I want to redo, probably in the slate colorway of the fabric on this chair (darker gray). My daughter has a set of six that I did. They make great dining chairs.
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