Leather steering wheel Options

[Montreal914]

Hello everyone,

I recently decided to rebuild my stock steering wheel and wrap it with leather. I got the kit from All Gun Leather in Florida. There are two options with this kit. Leather wrap on the plastic or making your steering like the 70’s 911RS which has a thicker grip. Basically, the plastic steering gets covered with felt then wrapped with leather. The key for this project is patience.

I first sanded down and repainted the spokes





Then I fitted the felt and cut it to size. It needs to wrap around and join but without any overlap.





Then I sprayed some adhesive and glued the felt cutting around the plastic part of the spoke.



Cross stitching is the next step. This is fairly easy. You just need a length of thread and a needle at each end (all supplied with the kit). For the thread, I estimated about 6 to 8 times the peripheral length that I was going to stitch.



I started with the two short areas between the spokes, then the bottom part, and finally the top. The leather is pre punched which helps a lot but you have to be careful and count the number of holes to make sure they match. Sometime you need to adjust.







Once the work is done, you finish the job using a heat gun to smooth out the wrinkles, making sure you protect the treads because they will melt.







Bolt on and enjoy your ride. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/driving.gif)





This project was a slow process and took about 5 nights of stitching (1-2h/n, one area at a time). I thought it was fun and the satisfaction when finished is well worth the work. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/beer3.gif)
Thank you to Mr.Kona for the inspiration. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/beerchug.gif)