No Matter If You Are Building A Full Restoration Or Just Want To Freshen Up Your Daily Driver, The Interior Is Where You Will Spend Most of your time when driving the truck, so why not make it nice to be in. Just getting in and out of a truck will wear out the seat; every time you slide in or out, your pants act like fine sandpaper wearing away at the nap of the material. Fast forward 10 years and you will have a hole in the cover, which leaves the delicate foam to wear out, and if that is left unattended as well, you will eventually be sitting on the floor.
Here is the worn seat in question;...
Here is the worn seat in question; as you can see the years of doing the butt slide in and out of the dualie has taken its toll on the factory cover. In the close-up shot, you can see what looks like cookie crumbs; those are actually foam that has shaved off of the cushion. This is a bad sign that more intensive work is going to be needed, rather than just installing a new cover.
The seat isn't the only piece in the interior that takes a beating; the dashpad is subjected to the rigors of the sun and the hot and cold cycles a full day will produce. These cycles will dry out just about any material to the point where it will start to shrink, producing big, honking cracks. These problems are becoming more common as the '73-'87 trucks age. Thanks to LMC truck parts, you don't have to resort to duct tape and towels to hide your shabby interior. The company offers just about everything you could need to freshen up the seats and dash to get the truck back to a respectable ride. LMC has covers that you can install yourself, in either factory-style cloth or vinyl, depending on what you have or want. Our truck was neglected so much that our foam started to wear out, and the dash looked more like the Grand Canyon than a dash.
So, we went to the professionals at Stitchcraft because they are a full-blown custom interior shop, and the foam repair would be a simple task for these professionals. Plus, we are working on a dualie, so this job is twice as much work, and we really didn't want to work that hard.
After reading this story, you might feel confident in filling the holes in the foam if you have a few necessary tools and some donor foam. Same with the dash, the kit from LMC is geared toward the do-it-yourselfer, but you will still need a sanding block and bunch of weights (you'll see why later in the story) to glue on the cover. Instead of boring you with more of this blah blah, let's just get on to the steps it takes to get the job done.