Refitting seat foam: Confor buildup

[Pasturepilot]

My normal flights are rarely more than two hours. I recently pulled a three-hour leg headed to central Florida and realized just how horrible the foam is in my front seats. As the flight bore on, the foam pancaked below me and left me with almost no support -- it was trying to dump me into the gap between seats. 

I poked around a couple websites that sold Confor (the new name for Temperfoam) memory foam material, but ended up just driving to Spruce. They've got a sandwich of firm/medium/soft that is almost exactly the dimensions of my seat bottom, but lacking a little for height. I bought two of the sandwich blocks and a sheet of soft to add to the top. 3M Spray 77 is a very popular spray adhesive for foam and fabric - and in fact I had a can left over from a car headliner project. In researching this project, it turns out that 3M Spray 74 is actually what you want to use with memory foam though. It ain't cheap but one can got me through the project... just barely. 

Of course I had to test-drive the foam on my ride home from Spruce! 

My seats did not seem to have any bolster contours - they were simply flat slabs, so I didn't get as carried away with all the carving, sanding, and shaping that others might have to do. Once I pulled the leather cushion off, though, I did see that at some point, there probably was some contour shape present, it'd just sort of faded away.

 

And, there was a spring on the left and right sides of the seat pan to offer some bolster-type shape/support.

I wrapped the springs with webbing to keep them from wearing through the foam. 

I cut a line into the bottom of the foam, completely through the bottom firm layer and partly into the medium, allowing it to push the sides up a little. To add to this, I ran about a 3" perimeter around the top of soft Confor. It was pretty comfortable but I would need to find a way to either pull the center of the seat cover down, or fill in the middle to keep from having saggy leather syndrome. 

I found a square of very soft old school foam in the shop and just used that to fill the gap. 

Reading that air and UV are the enemy of foam over time, I sprayed the cushions with the last of the adhesive and wrapped them in fabric. Not air-tight, not lightproof, but it is a little extra protection and helps to hold everything together. 

 

Pulled the cover back into place, and boom. We're in business. It's not the most beautiful fix ever - the front lip is a little more squared than the old one. But you can hardly tell with seats installed. 

I'd sat on the seats for several hours as I made up the cushions and put the covers back on at home, but wasn't prepared for the difference in the plane. I'm sitting probably a good inch and a half higher, and it makes a huge difference. It actually feels like a slightly larger plane, if that makes sense. I've only flown a short hop to try it out, but it's a bazillion percent better than it was. 

10/10 would recommend. 

[jetdriven]

confor gets weird with temperature. rock hard in the winter, and gooey marshmallow when sitting on the ramp in texas.  We did what you did, but used Skandia DAX foam.

[Pasturepilot]

DAX was a contender. It all came down to what I could get my hands on to knock this project out before I went back to work. The seat covers are held on with plastic retainers so if I wind up unhappy with them, it’s not hard to re-do. 

[MooneyMitch]

Congratulations!!  Such an improvement.  

[Ross Taylor]

That's about exactly what I did, but I got my foam from the super nice folks at Hi-Tech Foams...that lady (wife of the husband/wife owner team) I spoke to on the phone was so nice...what a pleasure!  Here are pics I took during the process.  Not shown are the next steps of adding the little angled "anti lean" strips along the edges and some foam on the front.

I used a cheap carving knife for the basic contour, as that works great on "regular" foam too.  Then I tried my knife, for tapering down the back edge, and found that worked great too.  And...NO...I did not cut on my wings!    I just put the foam there for the photos.

Like @Pasturepilot said...a huge improvement and I'm really happy with the feel.