VW Beetle Seats + Doortrims - Our Shed

By: Glenn Torrens, Photography by: Glenn Torrens

Date: 23.04.2017

Glenn Torrens gets down and dirty cleaning a set of VW Beetle pooey pews

My mate Don pulled apart a rusty VW Beetle in his garage. I’m not sure where Don acquired this thing, but somewhere in a tropical rainforest near a beach is a good guess as it had rust holes big enough to drop coconuts through. The remaining useful parts were removed before the corroded skeleton was loaded onto a trailer and taken to the scrappies.

The Beetle died but its donated organs are keeping others alive!

I bought the seats and door trims. Don’s rusty Bug was a one-year-only model which means the seats are difficult to find, so I thought I’d save them for a future Beetle project. As many car enthusiasts know, finding correct parts can sometimes be a challenge so you grab components as you find them, even if you don’t need them yet!

Moisture had destroyed the seats' matching door cards but the vinyl will be installed on another set of backing boards

The seats were filthy – and the door trims’ Masonite backing boards crumbling – from sitting around in the weather for who-knows-how-long, but I could see that under the grime they didn’t have any rips and the beading along the seat cushions’ edges – which often comes adrift – was intact.

A variety of scrubbing brushes can be found in hardware stores. Micro-fibre cleaning cloths work great

I reckoned that with a good clean, these seats could be almost pristine again.

There are many different types of cleaners; sometimes the big-buck ones are crap and sometimes the cheaper supermarket stuff works surprisingly well. A few years ago, I discovered a citrus-based degreaser, Citra-Force. It’s produced in Queensland by the same mob that produces Lanotec, the lanolin (from sheep wool) corrosion inhibitor I use on my salt-lake racer VW and my 4WD. Citra-Force is a very effective cleaner/degreaser for cars and the active ingredient, citrus oil (derived from orange juice production) seems to replenish the vinyl as it cleans it.

Freezer bags can be used to prevent cleaning fluid from drying out, giving it time to work on the stains

So I spent a very pleasant sunny summer afternoon scrubbing the grime from the seats. Some of the more stubborn stains – I’m not sure if it was chewing gum or tree sap – benefited from being soaked under a plastic bag for 20 mins or so to give the Citra-Force time to work on the stains without drying out or flowing away.

A liberal application of elbow grease and this is the result. Night and day

After a few hours – and a few beers, with Unique Cars’ words wizard Adam Morrissey as a drinking companion – the seats were transformed, with only a few deeper, darker stains remaining. The final task for the seats’ revival was to swap their rust-damaged base frames for a good spare set that I’d retained from another dead Beetle.

After a successful clean, the seats' original bases were replaced with good second-hand ones

Almost spotlessly clean and re-framed, these VW seats are now stashed in my spare bedroom, ready for a future project.

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