Seats (91, 92)

Drawing of interior, drivers seat, of a Mercedes-Benz type 219, © Daimler AG
Note the support bar over the doors and the pocket in the door lining, normally not found in a 219 as far as I know...

New upholstery

To my help I had Anne-Marie and Uno Zetterström in Horn. The seats where taken apart, cleaned and examined. The driver's seat got new spring core. There other seats were in a good condition but all pads where replaced with rubberized coconut "hair" pads, jute cloth was replaced etc etc where after new leather lining was adjusted, re-filled and stretched over and over again until I was satisfied where after it fastened to the frame. And in some cases had to be redone again. God, I must have been causing hundreds of blisters on these nice persons' hands. Sorry... The panels on the backside of the front seats were re-used but "decorated" with leather. New leather straps for the seat belts were produced (we'll see if I use those though).

It's also interesting to the the old stamps and notes on the under- and backside of the frames. First come the pictures of the old stuff:

Bellow I follow up with some pictures from the process as well as the final result:

If you would like to see even more pictures from the seat restoration process, go here; More pictures of seat restoration!

Assembly

Now it was time to assemble the front seats. There are a lot of different screws, nuts, clips, washers and rosette washers involved, many of them chromed. Only for the bracket for the reclining seat fitting you have 4 different, chromed screws as you can see below; M10x34, M10x27, M10x21 and M6x20. Time for the normal, rather time-consuming cleaning, polishing, painting and plating process.

In the first picture below, you can see the inserts that sit in the part of the reclining seat fitting that the backrest is attached to. You can also see the remnants of my father’s 2-point seat belts. These will not be used by my new 3-point seat belt installation. Since I didn’t have to re-chrome the seat fitting the holes for this will still be present. Regarding the bracket for the fittings I thought from the beginning that they would have some sort of gold paint. I realized however that is was only dirt and that they had been painted in silver.

In the first picture below you can see that I only have 2,5 leaf springs, the springs that push the chair up from the seat runs so to speak. Those were complemented by new ones from Karasch. The cage clip nuts also had to be complemented, I also damaged some during the installation process. That’s not a problem since they are standard hardware and readily available. The third picture shows 99% of the things needed for the mounting of the brackets, here re-chromed and re-plated. There are also some additional screws here, used on the seat fittings and backrest panels. That picture is followed by one that shows the newly silver painted bracket. Finally, you have the assembly of the arrester.

While working with the backrests I discovered and interesting thing. The seat fittings are mounted on the backrest frames with a screw and a special nut. I missed a couple of them and realized I couldn’t use a standard nut. The hole in the frame was too big. I spent some time trying to track these special nuts down. No luck. So I started to work with other parts of the car and then found a couple of standard cage nuts in my parts bins. The nuts fitted perfectly in the frames’ holes and look exactly like the “old” ones.

Note that in the pictures below I miss the rubber buffers that are inserted into the supports for the backrests of the reclining seat fittings. I had forgotten to order them. They are however now in place.

You can see the article Why it became a Mercedes Ponton  if you're interested in how my Mercedes-Benz 219 got reclining front seats.