I am looking at making my own seat covers for my '89 IROC, does anyone have a pattern or measurements? Front and rear seats. I would rather not take my seats apart to make a pattern. I will probably try and make some nice slip over ones first, just to get the hang of it, then look at replacement for the old covers. I would probably make it out of some kind of cloth, but I haven't look to see what is out there yet. Let me know if anyone has any ideas. Also if I am able to do and it looks good do you think it would be something people would be interested in?

 

I bet its out there, but I am not sure if anyone will be willing to give it up since people make a big buck on replacement upholstery. You will also have to have a serious industrial machine, unless using fabric and even then a decent machine is a must.
If your upholstery goes over 200 bucks you are probably better off getting fourth gen seats at a JY or getting 250 dollar racing seats.

 

I hate to say it, but the short answer is, it takes a lot of experience to have it look right. Having no prior upholstery experience, a car seat is not something easy to start on, it has a lot of compound curves to work with. Bench seats are slightly easier, but still not easy. xlwhellraiser is also correct about needing a good sewing machine, too. Upholstery is a fairly heavy material, and sometimes you're sewing through 3 or 4 layers of it at a time. I'm by no means an upholstery expert, and I've wanted to learn to do it for a while. It's sort of like the last thing I can't really do myself on a car, that I would have to have someone else do (beside rebuilding transmissions ). If you want to learn, I would get a spare set of seats and practice on those, so you can take your time and keep the original seats intact.

I did see a trick once for making a sheetmetal pattern for a motorcycle gas tank, done by Jesse James at WCC. He found a saddlebag from a vespa that he liked the shape of, and wanted to make a gas tank shaped like it. He wrapped a sheet of tissue paper over it, like the stuff you put in gift bags. Having it wrapped over the top of it as tight as possible, he traced around the bottom where the metal seam would be, onto the paper. Then, once the paper was flattened out again on a table, he had roughly an outline of the shape he needed to cut out. I have thought this process might work for making a pattern from a car seat, especially on the curved side parts.

Edit: Found a video of the process I'm talking about, this guy explains it better than me. I think it would work for seats as well, just trace at sewing seam instead of welding seam.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RJzPqQhFr2I