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Old March 15th 04, 06:19 PM
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On 14-Mar-2004, Mike Spera wrote:

Well, finally decided the old Cherokee 140 interior is due for an
overhaul.



Mike,

If your goal is to have a reasonably good looking and serviceable interior
with minimal investment, and if you are willing to do a bit of work, you
might consider the approach my partner and I took on our Cherokee 140 some
years ago. We took the seats (front and back) to an auto upholstery shop.
They did a nice job using standard automotive materials, including some work
on the foam padding. The turn-around time was no more than a few days.
Cost, as I recall, was a couple hundred bucks, but that probably doesn't
mean much today because of inflation. Of course, if we had wanted leather
it would have cost a lot more. You can easily shop around in your local
area and get quotes.

For new carpeting, first we took out the old stuff and made some
measurements. Then we went to the Boeing surplus store in Kent, Washington
and bought some pieces of airliner-grade carpet remnants. We had to buy far
more than we needed because of the odd shapes, but the stuff was so cheap it
didn't matter. We figured that carpeting suitable for a 747 should be OK
for a Cherokee with respect to flammability standards. The only drawback
was that we were limited to a couple of color choices. We used the old
carpets as patterns to cut the new stuff, and salvaged the old snap
fasteners. As I recall, we also used some new Velcro strips to improve
security of the carpet on the cabin floor.

For sidewalls, we got extra upholstery material from the shop that did the
seats. If I recall correctly, for the required stiff backing we used
thin-gauge sheet aluminum, also from Boeing Surplus. We just cut it as
required with tin snips. We padded the edges, added a thin layer of foam,
and covered it all with the upholstery.

The whole job took us a couple of days, plus the time required to deal with
the upholstery shop and Boeing Surplus. Total cost was minimal. Results
weren't award-winning, but a vast improvement and perfectly comfortable.

--
-Elliott Drucker