Archive for month: February, 2015

The seats in our Land Rover Defender are finished, I mean really finished, finished enough that every time we sit in the seats a puff of foam dust comes out of the cracks around the metal base, looking much like a bad case of dandruff, and on the new black carpeting to boot!

After almost 20 years the foam is disintegrating and cracked and there isn’t much support left in the either the seat base or the backrest foams.  The two options were either to buy completely new seats which run about €1,000 each or to invest the time to re-trim the Defender seats myself.

After doing a bit of research we found two companies offering re-trim kits Brit Part and Exmoor. After reading a number of reviews we decided to go with Exmoor Trims two seat Defender re-trim kit, which after shipping is about 10% the cost of new seats.

We were impressed with the quality of the fabric and the workmanship, though the instructions could have been a bit more detailed we did manage to figure the fiddly bits.  Brit Part packs an Instructional DVD in their kit unlike Exmoor, but there are a number of videos showing how to do it on both companies websites.

After we removed the old fabric I was a bit shocked to see how bad of a shape the foam was in, the photos don’t really do justice to how crappy the old fabric was and how good the new fabric is, you will just have to take our word for it. The condition of the seat foam made me a bit nauseous to be honest and even more happy that we decided to buy the retrim kit.

It took about 3 hours to do the first seat, and about 2 hours to do the second seat as I had a bit of help with the seat base.  We are quite pleased with how it turned out, and even managed to re-install the seats today as well.  What a difference it is to have the Defenders seats re-trimed!  The seats are now actually comfortable!