Replacing ‘05-‘14 Toyota Tacoma Factory Seat Covers

Hi, I'm Mike. Welcome to my Waffle Square, where I obsess about things and you get to benefit from it. Well, in this video, we are going to be removing both of the front seats from our 2005 to 2014 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. We are going to be doing a complete teardown of these ratty, stained, and torn old fabric seats, and then we're going to transform them to this with these custom leather seat covers from lseat.com. So let's get started. Brought to you by Waffle Square. Now, I'm not paid nor sponsored by lseat.com. I purchased these seat covers for my daughter's pickup truck with my own money. She's heading off to college pretty soon, and we want to give her some brand new feeling seats for her pickup truck to give it a little bit of a facelift. The reason I chose lseat.com is because I love their website. It's very easy to navigate. You go through there, you input the vehicle you want, and then you can pick the leather color, the stitching color, and you can even have custom embroidery such as some stitching or something done around the headrest. Very, very customizable. Now, speaking of the listing, if you look here, you can see that there is no headrest photographed in the picture, and that's because lseat.com did not have the template for the headrest. I reached out to them, and they said if I sent one in, which I did off of this headrest right here, that they would make a template, and now you get a perfect match headrest with every order for the same price. So without any further delay, let me show you how to remove the seats. Now, before we go any further, I'm not a mechanic. I just dress like one on YouTube, so you're just coming along for the ride to see how I'm doing it, and the first thing that I'm going to do is disconnect the leads to the battery, and I'm doing that because on both of the front seats, as well as the dashboard and the steering wheel, are airbags, and we want to deplete the power that might be stored up in that system, as well as have the battery disconnected so that when we are disconnecting plugs from the seats, we don't inadvertently set off that system and injure ourselves. So it's just a 10 millimeter ratchet, and while we have the battery disconnected, we may as well just hook it up to the trickle charger to keep it nice and charged since we're going to be here for a couple days without the vehicle running. All right, let's get our bearings. We are looking at the back of the driver's seat. I've got the seat pushed forward, exposing these two plastic trim pieces, and if you see in this picture here, there's just a little notch cut out on either side of the plastic piece here and here, so we're really not going to need a fancy panel clip style tool like this. Instead, if we just get a flathead screwdriver right where those notches are and give a little twist, it disengages one side of these little clips, exposing the 14 millimeter bolt. These are exactly the same size as the ones up front, so let's slide this seat back so we gain access to those. No plastic cover pieces on the front ones. Now we can slide this back and take a look right here where we have two plugs. All right, I repositioned the seat in the camera so you can see these two plugs right here. There's a yellow one and this gray one that both lead to this big wire. On the passenger side, that's it. On the driver's side, you can see we've got one more, this black one right here. Now the yellow one is pretty simple. There's this little white spring-loaded clip here. See how I can pull that back and then out comes that portion. The black one, you just push on this little part of the clip right here and that one slides out. Now the gray one, you can actually put a flathead screwdriver right in here to release that one and out it comes. This big wiring harness here is held in with a Christmas tree clip right here. I'm going to get my panel removal tool under there, try to pop that out. Here we go and with those three plugs removed, we can slide the seat back like this and just pull it out. Easy. All right, two quarters, a straw and chapstick. This job's paying for itself. No, all kidding aside, of and deep clean all the little debris that falls in between the console and the seats. So let's take a look at the covers you get from L-Seat. The first thing I notice is how beautiful the stitching is that is exposed. If we turn it over, you can see that on the backside of the leather is foam padding that has been adhered to it. So it is very, very cushy. We also have this nice like, boy, triple stitching or something right here. This is for the spots where we reuse these wire connectors and then we put our hog rings in to the seats. We have the plastic for the front of the seat going all the way around the front. We also have these clips here and here towards the back. And then on the very end here, this gets stretched and a Christmas tree style panel clip gets popped right there. And you'll notice that there is not the hole. You're going to self-punch a hole right where it belongs so you can choose the tightness. When it comes to the shoulder area where the headrest is going to go, there is also no holes punched. You will be lining that up by feel and then cutting out a section that you can stretch over the areas for the headrest. A couple of the things I noticed were missing right here on the original seat are these plastic clips that go around and clip onto the springs on the bottom of the seating. Those are missing. So I'm not sure if you're supposed to use zip ties or hog rings or just wrap these around a certain area, maybe tie them in a knot, but they don't actually have these plastic pieces. Also, the airbag stitched little label is not on these seats on either side here. So that leads me to believe these are ambidextrous seats. They're left and right. There is no differentiation and therefore they didn't bother to put the label on one side or the other. But it is nice that you do get this pocket here for the backrest of each seat. All right, let's start by pulling off the headrest and we will take that apart later. There's a little button on one of the sides. As you probably know, you just push that in and get past all these and pull it out. Okay, next thing we want to do is remove the plastics on both sides. So to make it easier for myself, I am going to slide the chair over on one side, but I also want to turn it around so you can see what we're doing. So on both sides, there is a phillips screw back here behind this flap and there is a little Christmas tree retaining clip up towards the front of the plastic piece. So to gain easy access, and since we already need to do it anyway to these two screws, let's go ahead and remove these two clips on the bottom and that lets this flap move out of our way to reveal these phillips screws. All right, you can see that guy start to break away. Now inside of here there's a another plastic piece kind of on the inside sandwiched together, but that is not really secured to this piece. It's just kind of friction fit so you can just kind of break it free. For this one up front here, we're going to want to get in here with our panel removal clip tool and just pop that off. Now we can flip the seat over and same thing over here. We've removed this screw and then right up here there's this yellow clip that is holding in a piece here. And then right up front here, there is a metal piece on the frame and the plastic is into it like this. So once we pop this center one out, then we need to slide it forward to get off of this one. And there we go. I'm going to take this little yellow clip, just pop that right back there. And now we have access to these two Christmas tree type retaining clips right here on the side of the chair. Now I've got safety glasses on because we're going to be popping off plastic pieces that might break and we're also going to be cutting metal hog clamps. Gentle with this one so we can reuse it. And I'm organizing everything I remove right into my awesome little grip mat. That was a Father's Day gift. Now there are two clips holding the backside of the seat cover on. They're just plastic, so you can either cut them off or remove them. All right, now I'm going to pull that piece of fabric back and then I'm just going to start tucking it underneath into the top of the seat. I can pull this seat cover back. There's a plastic clip on each side about midway. While we're at it, let's gently cut around the seat. This will just make it quicker. Now I'm just going to pull off all that plastic retaining clip that goes around the seat and I'm going to bring it up just like this. And what this is going to do for us is expose two metal bars going down either side from back to front and then right in the center where you see that stitch line is another metal bar and those are held to the foam with hog clamps because inside of this foam are metal rods that have been formed into the seat itself. So we just want to pull back and expose those clamps. Now this being the driver's seat, it has seen a lot of moisture over the years between drinks and food and body sweat, so these actually look a little bit rusty and gross. So once I take these clips out by cutting them with some wire cutters, I'm going to clean up this area pretty good. All right, this side is free. Let me show you the wire that we need to retain. So right here is a pretty stout metal rod. It is a little bit flexible for when you sit on it, but that is going to be retained. We want to keep that because we need to slide it into the replacement seat covers. So all three on the seat and then there are another three up top. Now that both sides are free, we can fold back and reveal the cross brace piece and cut out those hog rings. There's the third one. The one going across the seat is visibly shorter than the other two which are the exact same size, so pretty easy to keep track of them. All right, this is garbage and I would go in here and remove every little bit of hog ring that you've cut out and clean up whatever stains you might have that could come through and actually stain the leather, but I'll do that off camera. Let's now take off the back. It's very similar except these two bars on the back of the Toyota Tacoma seats act very differently than the seats. They only have hog rings on the bottom and the rest is a rod stuck up into here, which I'll show you later, and then put into pressure by being bent back and then hog ringed on the bottom. So we're going to need to remove several hog rings down here and then the ones across the backrest, but let's start peeling it up first and cutting it to expose those. Now when you're cutting the fabric, just be really careful that you're not getting into the airbag system or if you have an upgraded Tacoma, you're not getting into any of the heating elements that might be on the seat. Now ours is quite the base model, so it doesn't have the heating elements, but there is the airbag. Now once you've cut the back, you can fold that over and there's a couple things I want to point out. Number one, there is a plastic that is going over the shoulder area of the seat. We want to leave that there. That helps us to start pulling down the fabric over it and I'm going to use something very similar when we do the headrest. So that's going to be a pro tip. Now right back here, we have two more plastic retaining clips that we want to cut or remove. There we go. Now from the factory, this yellow cord goes right through that, so we're going to want to cut into that circle so that we can remove this and not be yanking on that yellow cable. On one shoulder area of each seat are these cross straps here that come through the fabric and they hold this piece in place. When I redid the Land Rover, they actually came with these. These Toyota Tacoma ones from L-Seat do not have that, so you can just cut those off. Right up here are these two plastic pieces that the headrest slips into, so you can just simply pull the holes that have been cut in the fabric over to one side and go right around those. All right, as you see in this picture, this is the rod I'm pointing to that goes all the way up both sides of the rear backrest, and there's a loop down at the bottom that's held in with several hog clamps. We want to cut those so we can remove these two metal rods. All right, and then that rod only has a loop on one side, so it just slides right out of the backrest. Now all that's left is to peel back the seat, and that exposes two hog clamps up here holding this cross piece. One and two, and there we go. This is all trash now that we have those metal brackets out. Now we want to remove this lumbar adjustment knob so that we can cut a much smaller hole in the leather than we would have to to stretch over this big knob. So thankfully, all you have to do is grab onto it and pull straight out. So the seat rests for the Toyota Tacoma are a little different than other things that I've experienced in that the foam is actually injected right in here wet and allowed to expand in some of the areas. So there's no real easy way to just peel off the outer shell. I think the best thing to do is just take a razor blade and go right down the seams here, carefully cut all the actual threads, and peel off each piece. All right, when we come back, I will have cleaned up all those hog clamps all around, all the remnants of the pieces that I had cut off, cleaned anything that I think I can remove that might be coffee or candy or some other kind of stains, and we'll be ready to start putting the new seat covers on. Okay, these are hog clamps. These are hog clamp pliers. I will leave a link to this kit that I bought off Amazon. It comes with several different sizes of hog clamps. I have found that this kind of middle size here works the best for the kind of upholstery we're doing. So you open up the spring-loaded handles, and then you seat that hog clamp into the pliers, just like you see there. Then we're going to take these rods, slide them through the fabric underneath the leather on the seat or backrest. So you're going to poke the sharp ends through the fabric, then push down into the rod that's embedded in the foam, and you're going to wrap around like this by squeezing, and thus join both the rod in the foam and the rod that's on the fabric together. All right, I vacuumed all these crevices out of the seat. I tried to put some spray foam cleaner on these stains, but it did nothing. So I went back with a hairdryer just to make sure I wasn't to be putting moisture into the leather and thus committing a stain from the very outstart. Then I took the little rods that had some rust on them. I took a Scotch-Brite pad and brushed off all that rust and then washed my hands and everything. So we are ready to go. First thing I'm going to do is the center rod that goes right in the middle of the seat, and I'm just going to push that through as you see here, and we are ready. Now I find that it's helpful to have this sitting right here where you're going to want to do your clips if you push this stuff through the back of the seat to begin with. Okay, by doing that, we accomplish a couple things. Number one, we get all of that excess material out of our way so that we can perfectly line up this seam right in the break of the foam. Also, it allows us to line up both of the seams that run from the back to the front so that when it comes time to fold everything around, everything's all lined up. All right, now we can get ready to put our hog rings through this fabric and then down into where the metal pieces are in the foam. And something very helpful on these Toyota Tacoma seats, as you can see, there's these little notches already in the foam that show you right where the openings are going to be to put your hog rings. So you really don't even need to see in there once you figure out what you're doing. I find it helpful to preload the hog ring each time you're getting ready to go in there because this other hand is going to be kind of pushing and holding things into the right spot. So now we need to take these sharp corners and start pressing them into the fabric. If you're noticing that the fabric is really hard to pierce, you can use a little awl like this and poke right through that fabric and then go right with your pliers into that hole you made. And I have found sometimes that's a pretty easy way to go. All right, I am pushing down. I've turned the pliers a little bit this way instead of perpendicular to that wire down there. That helps me get in there and get latched around it. Then I turn the pliers so that they are perpendicular to that wire and close the hog ring right around both spots. Just like that. Okay, same thing on this side. This center portion only takes two hog rings. Now sometimes the rings fall right off of the pliers. It's kind of frustrating, but having a pair of needle nose pliers around to pull that ring back out and reset is very helpful. Good, now that those two are done we can slide this down, put our rods through, and then we'll start working from either side to do the same thing with the hog rings. Now if you push down and you happen to miss like I did here, it's no problem. Just cut it off and load a new one. All right, once the four on each side are done, now we can start folding over the leather around the front and sides of the seat cushion. Now there's some spots here where three different pieces come together. You might want to get in there with your hand and push them out like that to form them real nice before you fold it all the way around and can no longer get your hand in there. See that? Now you can start kind of shaping and forming the wrinkles a little bit, but you're going to be stretching here to get it around this metal piece underneath, and then you're also going to have these flaps right here that you're going to be stretching back. So don't stress too much if the leather's got some little creases in it. A heat gun later can take care of that as well. We will cut this piece for the knob a little bit later when we have everything just about in place. All right, good. Now we want to flip it over and start putting pressure here to tuck this plastic piece around and have it clamp onto the metal. All right, if you recline the seat back as far as it'll go, it makes it almost sit flat on your work surface, which makes this part right here to stretch and invert around this metal much easier. So what do I mean by invert? You're going to want to stretch the leather so that this plastic piece comes up to this lip here and inverts around it. And these corners, once they invert and crease, will hold everything down. And this is what it'll look like. That plastic folds right around the whole way and is held in place because it flipped over and there's tension on these corners. Now we want to move back from the corners to this next clip right here. And as you can see, they've got this clever little saw tooth right there that's going to stretch the leather just like that. See how it's resting on that tooth? And that stretches this part of the leather. Now we're going to go back here and stretch this piece to this point and put that Christmas tree fastener right there. So on the back of the seat cover, there are these little clips that are going to receive a piece from the backrest. But if you look underneath, you'll see there's this sewn strip that's got nothing to it, no clamps or anything to clamp it to this portion of the seat springs. So I'm just going to stretch it like this and put some hog rings here, here, here to give this piece a little extra support. There we go. Now without a rod going through here to support the leather, it might just tear through in all four spots, but at least it's something. There we go. That looks nice. All right, let's do the backrest. All right, when it comes time to start the backrest, I have found that you want to invert it at the top here, push in the shoulders so all that's going to be formed properly, and have it inverted down to this first piece right here so that all we need to do is start pulling it down so that this piece right here is going to line up and we can put our hog rings in. All right, once we get these two hog rings in place, we're going to slide the leather down to about right here. We're going to recline the seat all the way back so that we can take this rod, slide it through that fabric that's attached to the leather all the way up to here. It's going to wedge underneath that post. Then we will use that to press into the foam and right down here secure the ring to this spot with three hog rings. Okay, so I've got both of those rods inside these fabric channels. Now you're going to have to reach under here to feel where that cross piece is and it's about an inch up from this seam. So you want to pull the rod back to about right here, then push hard into the leather so that that portion of the rod goes underneath that post and then force the rod out of the fabric channel and underneath that piece. All right, there's one. Let's do two more for security. All right, there's a lot going on right here. Let me try to explain. So coming up from the seat is this piece right here, this hook. Coming up from the backrest is this little piece right here. See if I can pull it down so you can kind of see it right here. It's a big plastic piece that goes across. Those two can't hook into each other but I think what I'm going to do is right here make a notch in the backrest piece, slip this through and then where to secure this. It won't stretch far enough to get onto this metal piece. It will pull off and this piece here that's on the flap is not going to reach either. So I think what I'm going to do is put a zip tie through here, zip tie it to this opening on both sides and then I think I'm going to take some panel fasteners, some Christmas tree panel fasteners, hook a hole like right here and put those through here and here. Okay, I marked this area with a sharpie when it was lined up with those clips. Now I'm going to cut a notch here, here and then push this back through to the back and put those clips through the cuts I'm making. And there we go. The seat strap is going through the backrest strap so that's going to hold the backrest in place tight on the front. Then this comes through and I've zip tied right around to this metal piece. Now you can let me know in the comments if I did that all wrong but I can't think of another spot where that would go. So to finish it off, this felt piece wraps around the back covering up all that open area and then we have these two elastic straps with no clips. So I'm just going to zip tie here and over there and that'll hold that in place. All right, those two elastic straps are finished off real nice. Good amount of tension. So now we can put the plastic trim back on. So that little clip right there clips onto that metal piece. Yellow clip goes right into there. Then we wrap the back around and you can see this spot right here. The screw goes through there and into there. I had several comments on the video where I did the same procedure for the Land Rover LR3 that I should try using thin plastic to help get the headrest covers over the foam. And here we go. They're all done. They're looking great. Now as far as the color goes, I chose dove gray which on the website seemed to be the closest but I can tell a difference between the trim pieces that are a little bit more of a darker gray than the leather which seems to be a little bit more of a tannish gray color. So keep that in mind when you order. Now if you want to, you can take a heat gun and really work on these wrinkled areas and the areas that are loose and try to smooth them out. But as you see in this video here, this is about what six months or so since I recovered these seats in our Land Rover. And just by leaving them in the car for the sun to warm up the interior has made them all tight and beautiful looking. So I think it would be a waste of time unless you're a little bit impatient. Now reinstalling the seats is basically the exact opposite procedure except I'm going to be adding these seat jackers by Desert Does It. I've watched some reviews and these go in the front of your seat. They raise it up about an inch and a half and that gives just a little bit of incline here that's supposed to make the front seats much more comfortable during long rides. Now I can attest that I have driven this truck and I've never really found it to be all that comfortable so I'm hoping that these might do the trick. Now if you found this video helpful, will you please give it a thumbs up? It's really helpful to the algorithm to start suggesting it to other viewers like you. Also please consider subscribing. I'm working really hard to put out good quality videos. There's a lot more to come on our Land Rover series and we're also still in the process of refinishing the electric dirt bike and I think you'll enjoy those videos. Now if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below. I read all your comments and anything that's other than a statement I reply to on every video. Now I'm going to leave links to the Lseat.com website. Also Desert Does It website where I got these seat jackers. Now other than the Lseat and the Desert Does It, the rest are going to be Amazon affiliate links so if you click on them and end up making a purchase it won't cost you a thing but I do get a small reward at the end of the month. Until next time, thank you for watching. So if you click on it and end up making a purchase, that is a very loud airplane.