Shop Talk Interior Designing and building a new seat from scratch by Jeff Newkirk, MFC Where do you begin when you have a blank slate? We recently had a 1949 Shepherd 18 come through our shop. The client had undertaken a full restoration of the vessel and wanted to add aft bench seating. Many of us do a lot of upholstery recovering-copying the old to create the new-but what do you do when you have no seat structure? The design inspiration for how to shape and build the new aft bench was taken from the boat's existing front bucket seats. Using the angles and shapes from those cushions helped the team visualize the shape of a new aft bench. Start with the existing design We took our design inspiration for how to shape and build the new aft bench from the existing front bucket seats. The bucket seats had seat cushions with rounded front edges that slanted aft back toward the bases, and the thickness tapered aft to create the bucket feel. We drew the angles and shapes from those cushions on a piece of Coroplast® corrugated plastic to visualize that shape aft in the boat where the bench would be. We had a design constraint with the fuel tank in the back of the boat, so the angle of the back structure had to avoid that component. Test-fitting and trimming the Coroplast mock-up let us quickly and efficiently determine the basics of the structure. Build the seat base We wanted a robust seat base structure, so we fit a ¾-inch plywood structural base onto a ¾-inch front riser that would be permanently mounted into the boat. The seat base would also be 40 Marine Fabricator | July/Aug 2024