The other pictures (even though no explanation needed, but here goes) are the removed staples, the bench with the upholstery removed, the vinyl upholstery (inside upside-down view), and the underside of the bench (extremely low-grade coarse nylon cloth, to cover up the edges of the stapled-down vinyl upholstery).
I'm going to build a Gorilla-Glued and air-stapled substitute (for the foam rubber) frame of 1"x2" lumber (actual: 3/4" x 1-1/2") with cross braces, rasped rounded corners, a piece of 1/8" thick lauan plywood on top (or perhaps 3/16" thick plywood) and EITHER a thin pad of dense (charcoal gray) foam rubber on top, OR a few layers of styrofoam cloth (as we've all seen wrapped around things such as laptop computers as packing material).
Once stapled back together, it should look the same as before and be just as tall (yet stiff, and barely padded) as before.
I actually have this extremely dense (styrofoam?) black thing that I bought somewhere (Humes and Berg...??) which is ALMOST the right size, the the narrow dimension is about 1-1/2 inches too narrow...If I added wood to make up the difference, I suspect that I would feel that edge, and would care for it...but MAYBE...?? I will insert it WITHIN the 1X2 frame to support the thing plywood top. Again, that weird black thing is VERY dense, VERY stiff, but doesn't weigh much at all.
Anyway...
Even though the thing is now c. 2 inches shorter, AT LEAST it's now stuff and (being careful around those Hillman pronged nuts) I can now effectively TEST this thing with my butt on the back and FatBastard on the front.
Anyway, none of the other tuba players (??) were there, so that made it extra fun, because I could completely control the tuba section's volume, attacks, the way the sound would taper off at the ends of beats when playing marches, and all sorts of things which one cannot control when there's a tuba section.
