The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Interiors Are broke Seat Wires Fixable?

I have a seat out of my 56 chevy pickup and the outer corner wire supports are broke. Are these fixable and if so, what is the best way to fix them? I assume a guy would want to maybe put a metal tube in the broken area that would extend an inch or so on either side of the break and then weld it in place? Hopefully my 2 pics i have attached will come through. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks.

I don't know how it held up but several years ago I brazed some broken wire supports like those. I pounded some U shaped troughs out of sheet metal (set them in a vise and beat them into the slot using a steel rod) and bent them around the supports to match the shape and then with an oxy-acetylene rig just fluxed and brazed the whole thing...figuring nobody will see them so it didn't matter how ugly it looked. They felt stiffer but last I knew they hadn't broken. The problem is where they break is a spring point and you aren't going to be able to replicate that...or at least I couldn't figure out how. The hotter you get it, the more you'll change the spring nature of it.

Pretty common for those to break. Others may have alternative methods. Mine is just one. Welding probably would work fine. I just happened to only have an O-A rig at that point and used it.

It looks like those broken wires might be spring steel as Jon mentioned, which can't be welded or brazed successfully. Heat of brazing or welding will take the temper out of them and they won't be "springy" anymore. If you can get a piece of tubing over the ends to splice them together, that might work.

Could you use a cable/fence ferrule or two? The kind that crimps on?

I can’t tell quite what I’m looking at there. Might not be room for it.

Well, the fact is once that spring is broken (and the ones I saw were broken at the point where the springiness was most needed) nothing you can do will restore that original temper. As I said the ones I fixed were stiffer but they did work. It is all about heat...brazing takes less heat than welding although if you could weld very hot and quick (quick as a rattlesnake) you might have a slim chance. But you'd be welding a 3/64" piece of spring wire so you'd have to get good penetration to make it stay together. Yes, a ferrule with set screws would work if you sacrificed the spring and cut it so that you had two straight pieces and then welded two ferrules together in the same angle you needed. And with the ferrule you still lose the spring from that bend. It would be gone for good. After I did this, the seat worked. It was just less springy than when new. It no longer had spring in the bend but on either side there was flex. As I said, hopefully somebody will have done this another way in the past. Broken spring steel is just not easy to repair.

Does THIS TECH TIP help at all?

Good tech tip overall for seat restoration, but Roy kinda glossed over the spring repair he did, saying he used an O/A torch.

I did weld a couple of perimeter wires on my seat springs, but they weren't spring steel as far as I know. The only real way to repair broken springs is to just replace them, either individual coils or the whole thing.

Almost all of the seat wire is spring steel. If not, when the sheet bends, the Steele just bends and stays that way. I find most of what I need in box springs used in household mattresses.
It usually has everything you need to repair a seat.

Mike

I just had to repair one of these springs on another vehicle I had the upholstery shop, an OT brand but the spring and location is the same. It wasn't broken "yet" but had rotted through to the point it was going to; it was effectively broken at that point and wouldn't take a bend - not unlike welding the spring steel together: It's joined but the steel won't do it's job right there. We didn't have another spring on hand to replace it with and really the spring was good except for that one point (the foam had been all chewed up by a rodent right at that point), so I decided to deal with it rather than waiting on a new spring.

I forgot to take a picture (kind of hard to describe and now it's been recovered) but I made a support plate (about 4" long) from flat stock with tube steel I cut down the middle and tacked onto the plate to support the spring and spread the load out across the spring to good springy steel. I had a couple of those 1/2 tubes tacked strategically to secure the spring from moving forward/backward. Underneath I added a stout V-spring I got from the upholstery shop, also secured with those 1/2-tubes tacked onto the frame. Located the spring in the center so the plate wouldn't (hopefully) create a stress point.

I rounded off the edges of all steel where anything was contacting the spring.

Didn't take long once I decided how to approach it. Maybe 1/2 hour of welding and cutting and then painted everything. Will it hold up? Time will tell but no reason it won't.

That's actually a good idea...spreading the stress out as you did. Thanks!

Lots of these are available on Ebay in different lengths- - - - -it might be a good idea to rebuild a seat structure with new parts instead on patching on old, tired stuff!

www.ebay.com/itm/385998374225?

Jerry

My seats had soft corners, worn out springs, so I used heavy dense foam shoved in the front and around the side. The foam acts like the coil springs. It rides much better now since I have support under the front, it feels similar to setting in a bucket seat now.

I don't disagree with that; unfortunately up where I'm at it's many weeks to months for anything to get here these days and the upholstery shop is busy, so... ya grab your opportunities when ya can.

If I had a nickel for every seller that claimed "x" days to Canada and then it's two months later, I'd be wealthy.