Sea Doo Seats Reupholstery

Replacing plastic with vinyl

As you can see, the seats are pretty bad on the GTIs. I've seen new skins for Sea Doos on eBay, but I'm not sure it would be worth it. Anyway, I've some vinyl laying around in my basement, so I decided to redo the seats, one in white, the other in yellow (so I can tell them apart).

Here is the seat, removed from the GTI.

The same seat flipped over. Basically, you need to remove the hardware at each end, and then remove about a zillion staples. I found a small flat screwdriver, together with needle nose pliers, and you can get the job done pretty quick.

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The seat strap also needs to be removed. I used a metric hex wrench to unscrew the strap at both ends. Carefully pry open the metal keep; I used a frat screwdriver. Don't mess it up, you can use them again to put on a new strap. I used some black canvas strap from Jo Ann Fabric.

Here's the old strap ... PU.

So, once the strap is removed, and all the staples pulled, I used a small spatula to scrap the foam away from the plastic mold. Looks to me like the manufacturer applied quite a bit of glue to hold the foam to the plastic, so it won't just pull off. Slowly scrap it off and try to do little damage to the foam ... you'll need the foam again.

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Similarly, the plastic skin appears to be glued to the foam. Again, using the same thin spatula, I patiently peeled the skin away from the foam.

Here are the main pieces of the seat: The skin, the foam and the plastic base. I sed the plastic skin as a template to cut out a rough approximation from my vinyl. I added two 6"seams, but I bet you could get away without them. I just wanted a slightly better fit.

Using staples and my standard staple gun, I stapled in my rough cut, and added the hardware back on. Eventually, I returned with a razor to cut off some of the excess vinyl.

Here is that little piece of seat, that is mounted onto the Sea Doo (actually in front of the seat). It was held in place by a bunch of plastic barbs, most of which I broke while removing it. So, I went down to the local hardware store, and through a combination of plastic washers, plastic bolts and plastic nuts, I was able to reattach this doo-hickey to the ski. Actually, I think the plastic replacement parts are even better than factory specs (by the way, not really plastic, but hard vinyl).

Same routine to remove the seat from the plastic mold, and the skin from the foam. Actually, reupholstery on this thing was tough; vinyl doesn't stretch all that much. But with a bit of muscle and a lot of patience, I was able to re-skin this with vinyl without adding any seams.

So, here is the finished product. Note the black strap. Looks good, doesn't smell and dries quicker than the plastic skins. I also did the ski in the background, but with that one I used yellow vinyl.