Do It Yourself Seat Repair Work

My boat is a 1999 R73 Ranger and I've put a few miles on the seats with all the fishing I've done over the last few years. With the number of times people have stepped up and down from the back deck to the seats, it's a wonder they didn't wear out sooner. I also learned the hard way after reading up on boat seat care and repair work, one of the major factors boat seat cracking occurs is caused by Armor All products. Yeah your seats will look shiny and new for the first year or two that you're using that stuff, but over time the seats will fade, dry out, and develop major cracks. At that point, it's time to plunk down some $$ and face the music as I just did.

I did some searching on the web to figure out the best way to repair the seats and settled on just buying new seat covers from Ranger Boats. They were not cheap by the way and from what I hear, neither is getting them professionally installed. I got the seat covers in the mail and that's where the fun stuff began. First item on the agenda was getting the seat bench out of the boat. Funny story there, I found two of the six screws that had to come out of the seats to remove the bench on my first attempt. I made a call to a few boat dealers and they couldn't help, so I called Ranger and asked the customer service guy. He told me that the seats were either held down by additional screws or a few J-hooks, Ranger had been using two different kinds of seats on that model. Well it turns out I had the seats with extra screws, but the customer service guy lead me to believe I had the seats with J-hooks. His instructions were to remove the two screws I found, the lift the seats about three inches and shake the bench free from the hooks. Well that didn't work. In fact, we bent two of the four remaining screws when we were trying to shake it free. Home Depot sold me some new ones later. :-) My wife, Kelly, finally noticed that the bottom of the seats seemed to be removable, which lead me to removing the center of the seat backing, see pics below.

Picture of the seats after removing the seat backing centers. There were four screws behind the seat backings.

Little closer look at the seat backing and some of the cracking that needed to be fixed before things got out of hand.

Ok so Kelly and I spent about 3 hours total so far getting the seats out of the boat, not bad considering we didn't know what the heck we were getting ourselves into. Now here comes the really fun part, getting the old seat covers off the seats! This took us all of about 8 hours worth of work pulling hundreds of staples out of the bench, see pic below for what I mean.

It may be hard to see, but all those silver glimmers along the edge of the cover, but they are staples, hundreds of them!

This is a picture of Kelly taking out some of the final staples, what a trooper! I can't believe she blew a whole Saturday helping me pull staples out of those seats and recover them.

I took a little break to snap a few pics before we put the new seat covers on, see pic below.

If you can't tell from the pic, Kelly is thinking, "Damn this is taking for ever!" We're almost done though.

One last pic taken before the job was completed. Would you believe I didn't take a final pic of the seats after they were done? That's because it was about 12:30 AM when we were done on Saturday and we just wanted to take a shower at that point and get in bed... hehe. Kelly is truly an amazing woman to support me and the crazy stuff that comes along with fishing. Since I know she'll read this at some point, I love you sweetie! Thanks for the help!!!

Clint's Top 10 Things you should know if you are going to recover boat seats:

1. You'll need a staple gun or two with stainless steal 1/2 inch staples.
   NOTE: Yes, the stainless steal ones are more expensive, but you don't want the seats to come apart after staples start rusting out because you bought the cheap ones.
2. Needle nose pliers and a flat head screw driver are a must for removing the staples holding the old seat covers in place.
3. You'll need some kind of table or saw horse to put the seats on while working, because working on the seats on the ground will kill your back.
4. It will take you atleast a full day with two people working at it.
5. A well ventilated garage with multiple fans is necessary when doing this in the summer with 100 degree heat!
6. Entertainment for your kids is necessary, because you can't legally administer enough Benadryl to keep them knocked out long enough to complete the job.
7. The fish won't bite any better after the new covers are installed.
8. No your boat won't go any faster or get better gas mileage with new seat covers.
9. After you recover the seats your next job is recarpeting the deck.
10. If you're planning on asking me to help you do your boat seats, you can't afford me!