Refurbishing the passenger seats, part 1

The interior work in the Aviation Museum Society Finland owned Sud Aviation SE 210 Caravelle III at Turku airport is under way and the passenger seat refurbishment has also been started. There will be four rows of seats in the cabin, with a partition at the back, separating the open area in the rear section from the actual cabin part. The front seats on both sides of the aisle will be double seats, but the other three rows will have the original lay-out with three seats on the RH side and double seats on the left. We have original textiles and seat belts for fitting about twenty seats.

This blog talks about starting the seat refurbishment.

All the seat frames in our possession have suffered from the decades of storage and they will have to be repaired. The work was started by choosing from our storage sea container eight seats, which were in the best condition. In good weather the repair and refurbishment work has been done outdoors, with the Caravelle’s wing sheltering a little from the heat of the late summer sun. On rainy days we have been using the cabin of the DC-3 (registered as DO-5 in the Finnish Air Force), standing next to the Caravelle, as a workspace.

The condition and functioning of the seat back, arm rests and seat table are checked and tested. If some part is not moving as it should, the aim is to repair and fix it to functioning condition. Especially the arm rests are broken or not moving. The plastic covers at the end of the seat frame, under the arm rest, have suffered from transport and storage, some of the covers are broken.  The seat back webbing is made of rubber belts, some of them have dried and crumbled and the metal hooks, fastening the webbing to the seat back frame, have broken. It seems that during their lifetime the seats have been repaired several times, mainly the arm rests and the seat back webbing.

Photo by Erja Reinikainen.

Fortunately we have six more passenger seat frames stored in the sea container and it has been possible to dismantle armrests, seat tables, seat frame plastic covers and seat back webbing from them to use as spare parts for the seats under refurbishment. Up to now the functioning parts on a couple of seats have been checked and refurbished, faulty and broken parts have been dismantled and replaced with spare parts – and the work continues. Seat tables have been overhauled and cleaned. In some seats the seat back structure, made of light metal, has broken and it has been strengthened with a patch sheet. The life vest pouches were removed from the seats. We don’t have any life vests and the pouches under the seat obstruct the refurbishment and painting of the seat frame.

The following step will be the sanding of the seat frame legs, where the paint is flaking and peeling off. The legs will be painted using paint which matches the hue of the plastic cover on the seat end.

Photos by Jouko Tarponen except if otherwise mentioned.