When you start working on seat repair you know that the major stuff is either done, hiding well or awaiting parts. Today was all about me. Since I got the car the seat bottom sank to the left. The first couple of weeks driving the car started to give me lower back pains until I discovered the issue. My immediate containment action was to stuff a folded towel under the seat to help keep it level. But the seat was lower than it should be and needed repair. Two things were required, a new foam cushion and a new seat diaphragm (type of rubber webbing straps). The final parts arrived yesterday so I immediately hopped to it by removing the seat (four bolts on the bottom, easy).

This opens the door to an opportunity to clean under the seat and collect some cool cash that only contributes to my labor of love rates.

As you can see by these photos, the foam had started to deteriorate at the edges and one strap was broken causing the seat to sag left.

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The first step after removing the seat was to unscrew the sliders that will expose the diaphragm webbing straps and the foam. The next step was to remove the seat cushion and leather upholstery. Care was taken to remove these rings that hold the material in place. The rings have teeth to grip the material so if you just pull them off you will rip your upholstery.

Once the rings were all removed, the upholstery came off with the old foam (see pictures above).

The most difficult and time-consuming part of this job was to remove the old foam from the inside middle part of the upholstery, since the middle is glued down. This took over an hour of rubbing the foam using friction with a rough towel. In all honesty I only got about 80 % off. My goal was to level the surface so what ever was remaining was almost flat with the material, more glue residue than anything else.

I was able to salvage the DOT fireproof material on the bottom of the foam, and I re-used it. But before I installed it, I used 3M super Glue 77 and sprayed the bottom of that weight sensor and placed it back into the new foam in its pouch.

After that I sprayed the glue on the DOT fireproof material and glued it back to the bottom of the foam. This material is useful to provide a barrier between the rubber webbing and the foam to prevent the webbing from pushing into the foam over time.

After that I sprayed the center inside of the upholstery, the thick padded part in the middle and installed the upholstery onto the foam. The sides are not glued, just the middle part as seen above left.

At this point I installed the new webbing diaphragm using a set of plyers to pull the clips and insert them into the holes on the frame. Now the seat was ready for the upholstered foam to be installed. Using the round clips, I clipped the bottom tight on all sides.

Before screwing the seat slides back onto the frame, I cleaned and greased the sliders. Then I vacuumed the seat area, collected my newfound fortune and re-installed the seat. As you can see below, the seat is back as well as a new addition to the car. A fire extinguisher that almost all MGB owners recommend that I have on hand. I took it for a drive and had to re-adjust my mirrors since I was riding high!

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