Vroom-Chirp: Tired of your hard arm rest?

Quote, originally posted by vroom-chirp »Me too.So i did something about it.
oh so soft now
Armrest padding

Here’s how i did it.

1. Get your self some:
- foam of your choice (fabric store)
- vynol / leather / or pleather of your choice ($10.oo per yard at a fabric store)
- Rozor blade
- office stapler, if you choose to do it my way, or another way to make the vynol stay in place while your streatching it.

2. Pull off your arm rest by removing the two screws at the bottom holding the hinge on. and wiggle the arch out carefully.

3. Remove all the screws, including the one hiding under the latch.
Armrest removal

4. Trace the top of the lid with against the foam, give yourself extra if your worried, you can always trim off more.
Armrest tracing

5. Cut it out.
Cutting out foam for the padded armrest

6. Now trim it at an angle, your razor needs to be sharp for this. You dont have to trim it off at an angle but, it looks nice under the vynol if you do.
Trimming the foam for the armrest

7. place it on top of the lid now, and make sure theirs not any hanging over the edge.
Putting the foam in place

8. Lay the foam and the lid down onto the vynol, and cut an over sized square around the lid, to make it easy to work with.
Make a pattern for the vinyl going over the armrest

9. now fold the vinyl up to the edge, what your doing is cutting enough to fold into the lid so that you can staple it in there. so mark how much your comfortable with stretching.
Stretching the vinyl over the armrest

you can roll the lid onto the side and use the edge as a “staight edge” once you’ve made your mark.
Tracing a pattern to cut off the excess vinyl

10. and cut it. carefull not to let anything move around, it will throw off your measurments
Pattern finished before trimming the vinyl

I dont have any pics of this next process, since its such an unorthodoxed way of doing this…. and it was hard to work on and take pics.

What you do is pull one side up and staple it in, then go to the opposite side and staple it in, then the top, and the bottom.
I dont know exatly how it SUPPOSED to be done but i just stretched everything into the lid and stapled it in there, the staples went in fine, and sometimes too far in, and out the other side, i just pushed them back in.

When you have it all nicely stretched in and your satisfied with the look, screw the liner back on and this adds more strength to holding the vinyl together.
Screwing the armrest liner back together