The stinky Miata clean up continues...

I'm fairly well equipped to deal with the stinkiness and dirtiness. I have an ozone generator and some VitalOxide spray. I think I can take care of any hard surfaces pretty well.

The carpet was nasty, and it got tossed. I have a replacement carpet set ready to go in.

But the seats...the seats. They are stained and mildewed. The rails are rusted and chewed up and barely work. Right now I've got them in garbage bags so I can run some concentrated ozone treatments but I don't know that it'll ever get the deep stink out. I don't know that it makes sense to spend money on half decent eBay covers and some non-rusted rails.

So -- ideas? Anyone got a surefire way to clean up old nasty seats? I've looked through some of the reupholstery threads and I'm not particularly interested in messing with all of that, but if it was cheap I'd do it.

Or should I just replace them?

 

Just cut all the old metal clips holding the seat cover and toss them in the washing machine. This even gives you the possibility to de-rust the seat pans.

Then fix the washed seat covers with zip-ties. Easily done in under 1 hour per seat.

See here - in German , but you get the point looking at the pictures...
Sitz Nr. 1 wird renoviert? | Trisha's Blog (MX-5 Resurrection)

 

I used laundry soap and hot water mixed in a bucket, and a brush. Drounded the seats, scrubbed, rinse, and repeat until they were clean. Then let them air dry. They turned out looking like new. Had to do it 3 or 4 times to get them so that the rinse water was pretty much clear. Seats even smell nice now!

 

Seat pans are rusted through (well, one of them is, anyway). Both are extremely rusty.

 

Try a Woolight and water mixture and let air dry.

 

You can spend hours and hours cleaning and making them less nasty.

But if pan is rusted through, I think they're ready for the dumpster.

 

That's the way I'm leaning. There's literally no part of the seat that's still in decent condition.

 

It's not difficult to remove the seat cover/skin, but man oh man is it time consuming if you want to do it without breaking/damaging anything. And if you got rust, good luck with those metal clips lol

 

Yeah, this basically confirms I just need to look for a pair of decent condition seats and toss these. Thanks.

 

Never mind the stink in the cushions...