Has anyone tackled restoration of vintage Steam locomotive cab seats, the old kind with the box springs in them? We are looking at either restoring these ourselves or having a company restore them. The seat cushions were badly damaged but the springs and wood bases are re-useable. Any advice greatly appreciated.

There's a synthetic retrofit for the old horsehair padding that went under the naugahyde.

Work with an upholstery shop that likes your project and will help you out with materials and advice.

dave

It's March, horse hair will be in extremely good supply for another couple of months, just ask any horse owner (you might be put to work grooming the critters, though)! Most of us just throw out our used hair anyway.

I did a quick web search on restoring horse hair upholstery, and it doesn't seem very difficult. For the actual upholstery fabric, you might have to make some compromises.

For a fairly simple job like this, I'm not sure there's much value in going to modern materials and losing the history...

:-)

Steve Hunter

You might check with these guys:

http://www.hahn-tractor-seats.com/

They're long-time advertisers in the magazine for the Historical Construction Equipment Association (HCEA). Old construction equipment has very similar seats to steam locomotives and these guys might be to help you out or at least offer some suggestions.

A quick search on ebay:

Synthetic replacement Horsehair
http://www.ebay.com/itm/POLISHED-BLACK- ... 5649000c3a

Cotton wadding to top the horse hair:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cotton-Felt-Uph ... 2eb633ddf0

For real horsehair I found this company, They are out of stock until July:
http://www.chaircaningandsupplies.com/i ... ge110.html

I found a few other suppliers for the horsehair but they all sell in bulk, such as this company:
http://www.onlinefabricstore.net/uphols ... 15-lb-.htm
Since they sell in bulk then perhaps they could hook you up with one of their customers or better yet, maybe they will donate enough for the project.

This last one is entirely appropriate as it was quite often (more common than not) to use a mix of horse and hog hair..... Somewhere I have a spec for it almost 1,000 miles away from my current location.


Cheers, Jason

Thanks Jason!

Holy delayed response, Batman! ;-)

Apologies for that I just came across it and noticed I had not replied.