The History of Northwest Seat Cover Fabrics is deeply rooted in OEM Factory Style fabrics. The relationship goes back about 25 years to 1997 when our company was established. We purchased automotive materials that were made by Collins & Aikman, Milliken & Co., and a host of others who have since shut their doors. However, automotive fabrics are in our DNA and we were inspired by the Original Equipment Material from the 2015 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and decided to pay tribute to it by adding it to our line-up. We looked at the colours and they were a good match with Ford, Dodge, Toyota and it has been in our catalogue ever since. It’s a durable heavy duty fabric with more than a 250,000 double rub test rating using the Martindale (Circular) & Wyzenbeek (Back & Forth) methods. It’s a popular fabric for Durability, Comfort and certainly the OEM Look. It is a Classic automotive look which is not offered by any other competitors in North America. OEM Cloth Seat Covers for Cars, Trucks and SUVs are available in Black, Grey and Tan colors.
When we first consider a fabric we always look at the Wyzenbeek test results.
This is also known as the double rub test. This is a durability test that was developed by 20th century inventor Andrew Wyzenbeek. A piece of automotive fabric is placed on top of a half-cylinder covered in a #8 cotton duck fabric. The half-cylinder then rocks back and forth simulating, in this case, the action of someone sliding into his car seat and sliding out. This is one double rub.
The second factor we look at is UV light protection. After many test samples, we decided to include a grade 3.5 UV light protective coating (200 hrs). The fabric will still fade over time but, at a much slower rate. Grade 1 coatings leave fabric feeling very natural but, with almost no protection, the color black would turn to brown in one year. Grade 5 coating does a very good job for protection but, makes the fabric quite stiff. Outdoor furniture is often receive grade 4.0 – 5.0 coatings.
The third consideration is flammability. Our fabrics are FR coating and depending on the style of fabric they’ll pass either the FMVSS302 (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard) or CPAI 84 Sections 5 and 6.
The fourth aspect we take into consideration is a fabric’s ability to provide waterproof protection. Most of our fabrics offer high water repellency or are waterproof. Just as with outerwear, at some point due to normal use, the effectiveness of a fabric’s ability to repel water will diminish. You can restore the fabric by either spraying Scotchgard on our O.E fabrics or a DWR (Durable Water Repellant) on any of our others.
Technology has really changed what we can do with fabrics. A good example of that is the family of camouflage fabrics we offer. Realtree, Mossy Oak, and Fishouflage all require as many as 10 screens to produce the camo seat cover patterns we all love.
Our fabrics really shine in HD because of the quality of the image when using heat transfer paper and the fact that we use durable 600 denier polyester fabrics.