What's a good needle size or needle style to hand stitch with interior. Aslo what about thread. Where does one go to buy these things.
You need industrial machines with large needles and big thread to make them. I used to buy my thread from automotive interior jobbers. You can't even get regular machines to use that large of a needle or thread size, and it is specifically designed for automotive interiors. You can use Marine grade thread as well, but that is a lot more expensive. Duane
Oh ok.I have an old tough machine, when I took it for maintenance the old timer was impressed with its strength. What do you think I can do with this? in Take a look at it. One day I want to buy an industrial machine, I remember the old Japanese units were good.
...careful, it's easy to fall into the "buy the tools rather than the product" thinking. How often will you make upholstery? That's a consumer-level machine, not saying it won't do what you want, but as Duane pointed out, it won't handle upholstery-level work. Example; my first antique restoration after we were married was a treadle sewing machine, that wife used to make all curtains and foam cushion covers for our homemade camper van conversion. We were poor and used patterned bed sheets for "upholstery fabric." Wouldn't have worked on real upholstery fabric. Still have it, used as accent table but still works...don't make 'em like they used to...
The problem is with the thickness of the materials. When you sew the inserts into the collars you are often sewing through 4 layers of vinyl plus the foam. You need a big strong needle to go through all that, plus thicker thread to hold it all together. Regular machines simply will not do that. Then you break or bend the needles, and pretty soon you end up with bigger problems then you started with. Duane
If you were going to re-stitch a pleat in an insert, where the thread pulled out, then you could hand sew it. I have done that several times myself with original seats, but it involves taking the cover off the frame and if you don't know what you are doing, you will rip the seat cover up by the time you take it off and then put it back on. If you are trying to hand sew an entire seat then it would never work because it would never be straight and you don't have enough hands to hold everything together while you are sewing it up. The seams would simply never be tight enough and it would look like $HIT. If the idea was to see if you could do it, that would be one thing........................................but if you wanted it to look nice, then......................................it would be an exercise in futility. Duane