11-27-2024, 08:15 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-27-2024, 08:29 PM by Jack Aperio.)
I finally got around to replacing my exterior vinyl upholstery on my 1995 4000 Express. It was all original and showing its 30 years of use. It’s not an incredibly interesting project but I thought I would share what I learned during the process.
The removal of most of the seating and back cushions is pretty straightforward. The cockpit seating is on hinges except for the engine room hatch, which is secured by six screws that are easily removed after removing the sound insulating foam from the bottom of the engine room access door. The backrest to port of that location also had three or four screws that needed to be removed from the locker directly behind. The long backrest at the stern simply lifts straight up off of a gutter/track system as does the backrest adjacent to the icemaker. The interesting part came when I tried removing the helm seat area adjacent bench seating. When trying to remove the nuts from underneath I found the bolts would spin with them. Tiara used nylon locknuts and had sawed off the end of each bolt making unthreading nearly impossible without getting access to the bolt from above. The seat cushion is over the top of them and I could not find a way to remove it. Luckily, there were decent size washers underneath that I could get a flathead screwdriver under and apply downward pressure to remove those nylon insert locknuts. This took me several hours as access is pretty tight, climbing into the small compartments to access each one. It wasn’t until I had everything removed that I noticed how Tiara managed to put this together originally. Upon closer inspection, there are six holes visible from the inside of the compartments underneath that have been filled with 3M 5200 or equivalent. These are the access points where Tiara secured the seating to the seat base with six long screws. In hindsight, simply removing the caulking and removing the screws would have allowed me to lift the seat cushion off to access the top of the bolts and would have saved me a couple hours of anguish.
The project turned out great. My upholstery guy matched “Monticello-MOT 9805” which looks to be the exact same product from 1995 although I could not confirm as Tiara did not have any record of what was used in that era. It looks original and I couldn’t be happier with the end result.
The removal of most of the seating and back cushions is pretty straightforward. The cockpit seating is on hinges except for the engine room hatch, which is secured by six screws that are easily removed after removing the sound insulating foam from the bottom of the engine room access door. The backrest to port of that location also had three or four screws that needed to be removed from the locker directly behind. The long backrest at the stern simply lifts straight up off of a gutter/track system as does the backrest adjacent to the icemaker. The interesting part came when I tried removing the helm seat area adjacent bench seating. When trying to remove the nuts from underneath I found the bolts would spin with them. Tiara used nylon locknuts and had sawed off the end of each bolt making unthreading nearly impossible without getting access to the bolt from above. The seat cushion is over the top of them and I could not find a way to remove it. Luckily, there were decent size washers underneath that I could get a flathead screwdriver under and apply downward pressure to remove those nylon insert locknuts. This took me several hours as access is pretty tight, climbing into the small compartments to access each one. It wasn’t until I had everything removed that I noticed how Tiara managed to put this together originally. Upon closer inspection, there are six holes visible from the inside of the compartments underneath that have been filled with 3M 5200 or equivalent. These are the access points where Tiara secured the seating to the seat base with six long screws. In hindsight, simply removing the caulking and removing the screws would have allowed me to lift the seat cushion off to access the top of the bolts and would have saved me a couple hours of anguish.
The project turned out great. My upholstery guy matched “Monticello-MOT 9805” which looks to be the exact same product from 1995 although I could not confirm as Tiara did not have any record of what was used in that era. It looks original and I couldn’t be happier with the end result.
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