Project Boondoggle (or, so I went and bought a Z!)

[Captain Obvious]

Looks great so far. I hope the leather work goes well.

I had one (non-Z) steering wheel reupholstered in my past. I didn't do it myself and I found it hard to find people who still do that kind of work.

[sweatybetty]

4 hours ago, grannyknot said:

I would be tempted to just leave it with the cork with a sealing coat of some kind to keep the stains off, looks really good.

+1 looks nice

[dmorales-bello]

Perhaps staining the cork a bit darker before sealing it would look more like the OEM wood and look really cool. 

[Captain Obvious]

I would be happy to be proven wrong, but I highly doubt the cork would be robust enough without a top covering of something else.

[charliekwin]

I think you're right Cap. The cork sheet is soft and tears easily; I don't see how it could withstand the abuse a steering wheel gets. For any future people that would like to try it, I wouldn't even know where to begin with respect to finishing. It would look nice if it were darker, but I don't know how well staining would work given cork's general reluctance to absorb liquids (that's why it's used for, well, corks). The stuff doesn't even work well with polyester resin! High-quality handlebar tape would likely work, but would have a different look.

[charliekwin]

The steering wheel wrapping is underway.

There's an upholsterer down in (I think) Mexico who goes by "cechaflo" that posts videos on YouTube. He does some pretty incredible work, and I watched his steering wheel videos a number of times, so all credit goes to him: https://www.youtube.com/user/Cechaflo

The first step was deciding on the seams. I ultimately decided on four seams, because there's no sense in making the first time any easier than it needs to be. Actually, that decision was a combination of the direction of my leather piece and my own preference to avoid asymmetry in the wheel. I marked off the seam locations as best as I could (tougher than expected) and measured everything following the cechaflo tutorials. Then used Illustrator to lay out the templates and got to cutting. Everything marked on the back side to make sure I lined it up the same way.

The last time I sewed anything was -- I believe -- in my 7th grade Home Economics class. So a bit of practicing and step-by-step instructions were in order. I don't have enough leather to screw this up. The four seams actually went on pretty well, and I have a leather band to show for it!

The seams create bulges on the wheel. There are two ways of dealing with that. One is skiving the ends, another is cutting a groove in the wheel. I went that way, and it worked out pretty well.

The next step is to trim everything down to size. The only hiccup I'm running into now is that the leather wrap is a little bigger than I think it should be. There's a bit of excess around the grip, which I thought would be taken up by the stretch around the circumference, but that hasn't happened. I'm pretty happy with the size of the wheel, so I don't want to pad it out too much, but another strip of cork around the outer side may be needed here, since cutting the leather would open the seams. Other than that, so far, pretty good.

[wheee!]

Wow he's good! Can we ship wheels to him for custom work? I didn't see any links to a website for business...

[charliekwin]

His videos are outstanding, too. I'd probably wouldn't have even considered this little project if I hadn't stumbled across his channel a while back.

I don't know if he has a site for his shop, but he's responsive on YouTube. He did put up this site some time ago as well: http://upholsterytrainingprograms.blogspot.com/

[charliekwin]

Moving along with the wheel...so the problem I ran into was that the leather band was a little too wide for the size of the grip. You can kind of see in the photo, but I had about 1-2mm of overlap where I stitched the pieces together. I ended up putting another layer of the cork sheet around the outside edge of the wheel, and that was just enough to make up the difference. It's maybe just a bit thicker than I'd have liked, but the wrap fits better, so that's a trade-off that I'm willing to make.

That done, the next step is trimming. First, a rough trim to remove the bulk of the excess material.

Then, painstakingly making my way around the the whole wheel, cutting the leather back so it meets up with the line I scribed at the beginning. Check and recheck, taping everything along the way.

And repeat on the back side. The edge of the leather helps as a guide, but it's still slow going. I didn't check the time, but I'm certain the trimming alone took 3-4 hours over the weekend.

I'm starting to think this might really work...it actually looks like a real steering wheel cover!

[wheee!]

Nice work and kudos for being a trailblazer!

[disepyon]

4 hours ago, charliekwin said:

Awesome Wheel! depending how well your work holds up I would pay you to redo my wheel.

Im more interested with the half eaten orange wrapped in saran wrap.  Never seen a half eaten orange wrapped.  Do you wrap the the apples like that too?

[charliekwin]

I have a 5 and 2 year old that only eat a piece at a time. And yes, the half-eaten apples get wrapped like that too!

I'm not sure you'd want to pay me what my time costs on the wheel. Materials are reasonable (probably will be in it for <$100, including stuff like grease pencils and needles that I won't need for anything else), but the time isn't. I haven't kept track, but by the time it's done, I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up taking 20-30 hours. If I did a few more, maybe half that, but I can now see why custom wheels cost so much. I don't factor in labor for my cost, but for anyone else: buy a Nardi!!