Please Take Your Seat

Somebody at Cleveland must have taken this advice too literally, because there was a missing seat cushion in the 319.

Fortunately we have a complete set of spares from the 318, so replacing it is not difficult. I picked the best one I had out of storage. As seen here, we could almost use it as is, if we were desperate enough. You could, for instance, paint it with flat black latex. That helps. But we also have plenty of new replacement material on hand. So I'll recover it.

Here's a view of the bottom. There are four parallel sets of springs with flat steel tops and wooden stringers on the bottom. You can see that when a spring broke or came out, the CA&E would patch it up with spare strips of material. This one required a little additional body and fender work, and is now ready to go.

The material is nailed to the bottom edge with lots of carpet tacks, spaced about an inch apart. The only annoying part of this job is removing all the rusty old tacks with a tack puller.

Finally, the old material can be removed (seen at the left of the picture). The entire assembly of frame plus springs sets is covered with a layer of ordinary canvas. On the top, there's a layer of horse hair (I guess) and then a layer of felt. This material is generally OK.

Then we start installing the new material, using carpet tacks as before. The seat cushion is turned over, of course, and can be stretched by hand as you tack. The material looks dusty from being pressed onto the bench. Here I've just started on folding over and nailing together the first corner.

And the finished product looks like this, ready to pop into place. Please take your seat, but only until the end of the trip!