The long-dormant Agave ’72 2002tii that I bought sight-unseen in New Alban, Indiana (after it fell into my lap when I used the Hack Jedi mind trick of not being interested in it, which only works if you’re actually not interested), is now safely ensconced in Louisville—in the garage of Jake Metz, the fellow who looked at it and reported back to me. Rather than having the car shipped up to Boston, I have decided to get down to Louisville as soon as I can, with tools and a bunch of tii parts; I’ll take people up on their gracious offers of bed and beer, and see if I can sort the car enough to drive it back.

    The free 2002tii that I referred to last week has not yet emerged Brigadoon-like from the mists of upstate New York. Actually, I suspect that this tii is like Schrödinger’s cat; it only exists if you or someone you know looks at it.

    So for now, it’s back to trying to sell my E30. (Note: I’ve put the E30 up on eBay, and by chance, the auction will overlap with the publication of this article for a few hours.)

    I floated the 1987 325iS on Facebook a few weeks ago, looking to get eight grand for it. The car is pretty and shiny, remarkably original and intact, and hasn’t been cut-up, stanced, or boy-racered. The iS-specific bits are all still there. But even in an environment where E30s are appreciating, and where the iS is the next one down the value list after the M3, the consensus from the E30 peanut gallery seemed to be that eight grand was a bit of a stretch.

    One reason was the seats.

    The cars that bring all the money are the ones that present a unified whole that is greater than the sum of the parts—where exterior, interior, and mechanical condition all are flawless or nearly so, and the eye isn’t drawn to anything that’s amiss. My car looks great at a walk-around, but like any 140,000 mile car with sport seats, the bolsters on the driver’s seat were worn and cracked. The E30’s passenger seat was better, but both seats had darkened from sun exposure from the original Pearl Beige to almost an olive tint.

    I took the car in to a local upholstery shop. The guy said that they charge a very reasonable-sounding $150 a seat to dye the seats back to the original color, but pointed out that two of the cracks in the bolsters on the driver’s seat were worn through to the point that they were now holes, and that the piping on the left seat bolster was obviously split in several places. He advised me that the seat would look poor if it simply were dyed without first repairing it. The passenger seat, not surprisingly, was in much better shape and could be dyed.

    So I needed to repair or replace the driver’s seat. It’s exceedingly rare to find a used à la carte E30 driver’s sport seat with uncracked bolsters, but good passenger seats from parts cars show up fairly often. E30 sport seats are like vintage Recaros in that the seat bolsters and foam are symmetrical, allowing you to swap either the whole seat or the parts. You can, in fact, take a passenger seat, move the seat-belt attachment from the left side to the right, and simply put it in front of the steering wheel—but if you do, the adjustment levers will be on the wrong side of the seat, requiring you to slide your hand between the right side of the seat and the transmission tunnel. I’ve certainly done this left-right swap in a 2002 both with original seats and with Recaros, but it’s not the way to maximize the sale price of a nice-looking car. The correct not-so-hack way to fix the seat is to replace the bolsters themselves. This entails procuring a good passenger seat, disassembling it, taking the bolsters off it (and the foam, if the driver’s seat needs it), doing the same to the driver’s seat, installing the good bolsters, and reassembling.

    Since there’s no better time to dye a seat than when it’s already disassembled, I went all the way down the rabbit hole and dyed the seats myself. I’m very happy with the results. In the best med-school “see one, do one, teach one” paradigm, here’s what I did.

    PROCURE A GOOD PASSENGER SEAT

    Step One, of course, is to find yourself an intact passenger seat that has the non-ripped upholstery pieces you need. If you’re not going to dye the seats, obviously you need to find a seat that’s the same color, but if you’re going to dye them anyway, you have some leeway on color-matching. I’m not sure that I’d risk putting, say, Cardinal-Red leather bolsters on a Pearl Beige seat, because as the leather wears and cracks, the original color will likely begin to show through, but colors that are similarly light or dark (Natural as opposed to Pearl Beige, for example) should be fine.

    I found a good but dirty Pearl Beige passenger sport seat for $100 on Craigslist in upstate New York and snagged it.

    When you buy a used seat for parts, be sure to double-check all of the upholstery on your driver’s seat, and then check carefully that the pieces you need from the parts seat are intact. In my case, once I got into it the project, I wound up swapping not only the bolsters but nearly all the upholstery onto my driver’s seat, because pretty much all of the pieces from the parts seat were better. There was one divot on the thigh bolster of the seat bottom that I needed to fill, and that was a pain.

    DISASSEMBLE THE SEATS

    Disassembly of E30 sport seats has a lot of steps, but it’s pretty easy. You should be able to get two seats apart in an evening. Basically, you pull the trim and the levers off, pull the back cover off, detach the cables, unscrew the seat back and pull it up and off the base, pull the sliders off the bottom, and then detach the hinges. It’s covered very well in this online how-to and in this video.

    Other than the video making the unforgivable sin of not knowing what snap-ring pliers are, they both do a very nice job of showing you the necessary steps, so I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow here. I’ll just illuminate a few steps. Be sure not to confuse the parts from the driver’s and the passenger’s seats. It’s a good idea to use labeled boxes.

    Never having done it before, I found that the most challenging step in the disassembly was removing the little plastic clip that holds the seat cable to the hinge without cracking the 30-year-old plastic. You first need to bend the tab on the little metal clip on the end of the cable and slide the clip over its post. Then, gently lifting the top of the plastic clip with a very small screwdriver and pushing/twisting at the bottom of the clip with a large screwdriver does the trick. Just don’t lift it too high, or you’ll break it. Once I figured out the trick to getting one of them off, the other three went very quickly.

    Then you undo two Phillips screws and pull the seat back off the seat base, leaving you with two separate sections that can be easily moved around.

    The two links above make a big deal out of taking off the seat hinges, which turns out to be absolutely trivial. You simply pry the part of the hinge with the square hole in it up off where it’s sitting on the bracket for the seat rails, squeeze the latch lever with needle-nose pliers, rotate the hinge past the latch, and pull it up and off.

    Note that the hinges have little gas-pressure pistons in them (like very small hood or trunk struts) to make it so that the seat doesn’t abruptly drop backwards when the recline lever is pressed. If these cylinders have failed and you want them to work, this is a great time to replace them.

    You can pull the knob and lever, the plastic trim, and the rails off the seat base either before or after you separate the back from the base. The lever is held on by a Torx screw. The knob that extends and retracts the thigh bolster can be a bear to get off; it isn’t held on by any fastener, but if it’s never been off, it’s really tight on its shaft. A pair of plastic pry bars positioned on both sides of the knob, levering on small pieces of wood wrapped in cloth so they don’t mar the plastic trim, are necessary. Unlike the plastic cable clips, knowing the trick doesn’t make it go any quicker on the second one; you just need to muscle it. One knob popped off with such force that I thought it was going to shatter one of the fluorescent lights in the garage.

    When you’re done, you are left with the separated unadorned seat back and seat base.

    PULL THE UPHOLSTERY OFF

    Both the bolsters and the center cushions are held on the seat frame by hog rings (round staple-like clips) and by sections where the leather is stretched over small metal tabs that are then bent down to hold it in place. Bend these up and pull the leather off over them.

    The worst part of upholstery work is the degree of interaction with hog rings, but it’s not brain surgery (unless of course your brain is actually held in place by hog rings). You may read about using “hog ring pliers.” It’s important to note that those are needed to install the hog rings, not to remove them. All you need is a pair of really stiff needle-nosed pliers, or even a pair of wire cutters that you don’t care about dulling. You simply grab each hog ring and twist it off.

    Note that, unfortunately, the center cushion obscures some of the metal tabs for the bolsters. This appears to be true for both the seat back and the seat base. Maybe it’s possible to remove and fully install the bolsters without removing the hog rings for the center cushion, but if you’re planning on dyeing the seats, just bite the bullet and do it, since the results will be better with the seat fully disassembled anyway.

    Obviously, if the source of the good bolsters is a donor seat, you need to pull the upholstery off both the seat being repaired and the donor seat.

    REPLACE THE TORN BOLSTERS

    If the foam on the seat being repaired is damaged, pull it off and swap it with the good foam from the donor seat. It’s held on with rubber cement and should pull up without damaging the foam if you work slowly and with care. Then slide the good bolsters onto the foam.

    Once the good bolsters are on, you need to re-attach the hog rings, and that goes much more slowly than yanking them off. I re-used the old rings, threading them back through the holes, holding them in place with needle-nosed Vise Grips, then squeezing them closed with the hog-ring pliers. Occasionally I couldn’t get the hog-ring pliers correctly positioned around a ring, and needed to jettison them and use two pairs of needle-nose pliers instead, positioning one pair on each end of a ring’s opening and pushing them toward each other. It’s time-consuming but totally do-able.

    Once the hog rings are in place, stretch the leather over the metal tabs and bend them back down. Voila! You have replaced the bolsters!

    If the upholstery is intact, reattach the hog rings holding the seat cushions to the frame, reassemble the seats, and put them back in the car. But if the seats are old, faded, and cracked, and you’re planning on dyeing them, do not re-install the center cushions yet. The results will be better if you dye the disassembled pieces.

    (Next week: To quote Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, “Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, dyein’ time’s here!”)—Rob Siegel

    Rob’s first book, Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, and his new book, The Hack Mechanic Guide to European Automotive Electrical Systems, are available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, ECS Tuning, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get personally inscribed copies through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com.