Miraculously Restored

This morning I decided that I was tired of dealing with the flattened foam in the driver's seat of the pedovan. Over the years of people sliding over the side of the seat to get in and out, the foam had been crushed and flattened to a shape entirely unbefitting a posterior of refined taste such as my own.

After a bit of muddling with some bolts and screws, I was miraculously able to refurbish the seat to look almost like new again!

... by, of course, swapping it out with the passenger seat base.

The good news is that nobody ever sits in the passenger seat, and those who do should be thankful to be chauffeured around in the first place and not whine that the seat foam isn't to their satisfaction.

I was a little bit tempted to swap the backs too, but because the upholstery is asymmetric (there's a hole on one side that the arm rest goes through) it would have been a bit more involved as I'd have to skin the seat, swap the foams, then re-stuff them and that's honestly just a bit too much work.

While I was poking at stuff I noticed that I was getting a bit of rust along the lower edge of the passenger side door. Upon closer inspection I discovered that the sealant along the seam of where the lower part of the outer door skin is folded over the inner door stamping had failed, and was trapping condensation water that would normally drain out the weep holes at the bottom of the door. I gave it a quick hit with a cup wheel to knock off the old sealant, loose paint and corrosion, and smeared on some silicone to keep the water from collecting there again.

At some point I'll pick up a can of white rustoleum or something to add a layer of protection over the bare metal there, but given I live in California I'm not too worried about the rust progressing much before I get around to that.

There's a bit of rust staining on the outside of the panel and I'm pondering what to do about it. I could leave it as is and just not care, or I could go through the trouble of sourcing some matching white paint, spraying up part of the body panel, sanding and buffing to blend it in, etc. It's a lot of work for a minor problem but I do have a bit of paint missing elsewhere on the van so I might end up going down that road eventually anyway.

But again: California, so I'm not in a big rush.

There's still plenty of stuff on my to-do list on the van. Still need to swap out the steering wheel, finish up the wiring from the aux battery to the inverter and the power ports that I mounted to the seat bases a while back, and of course build the bed/bench/shower/sink/whatever module that I've been cooking up in my head to make the rear pleasantly campable.