Automotive Interior Repair with The Interior Guy

This is definitely not a quick fix or a temporary fix that I’m going to talk about today. This is the way that I repair leather on a daily basis that has been worn or cracked.

Read the rest of this entry »

Resurfacing a leather seat in your automobile with today’s leathers require a real technique and the right leather dye to achieve a professional job. There are 2 types of leather that I have seen and worked on in today’s leather car seats. You have Nubuck leather or as some call it the soft leather and you have the finished leather which is mostly what you see. The leather dyes you use are completely different too. Aniline dye is used with the soft stuff and a water borne urethane dye for the finished leathers, both mixed with premium tannery pigments. Resurfacing leather applies to the finished leather, when you dye suede the aniline dye is a penetrating dye, so heres the right way to apply dyes to a finished leather seat. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dash Peel. A problem I started noticing in some of the earlier model vehicles a few years back and have been fixing them ever since. The cause is the water based dyes being used on dashes and some trim pieces being lifted from the plastic by solvent based dressings and cleaners being sprayed on the inside of our cars in the attempt to keep them looking new and clean.

Solvents and water based dyes just don’t mix, obviously. Read the rest of this entry »

How to mend a vinyl seat is probably going to be your easiest fix, when it comes to vinyl repair. There are those one’s that are a little tricky, but all in all the seat repair is the easiest, there is more padding behind the repair area, under patches can be used to reinforce the repair, they just seem to give me less fits and are easier to mend. Vinyl repair is definitely a game of skill balanced with patience. Taking your time to make your repair look perfect and not just good enough, will make or break a vinyl repair craftsman.

One thing you definitely need to keep in mind is if the hole or crack is to large then is needs to be replaced not mended. I’ve seen some pretty blown out seats in my day and have turned down a lot of work because I know my limitations to my pixie dust, as some of my customers call it ( that is one reason I love my job so much is because the products I use are definitely like magic). If the seat has a hole in it let’s say 3 or more inches maybe 4 but depends on the under structure, it needs to go to an upholstery shop. The thing is a repair is just that a repair, the products are made for small imperfections, not blow outs, that if left can get worse. But by mending them you can make a piece of vinyl look new again and the repair will last longer when done so. Read the rest of this entry »

There are so many different types of automotive leather seat repair, all with different situations and applications. There are holes, scratches, gouges, cuts, scrapes, worn or cracked, and just down right grungy looking leather seats. I think I got them all covered, well in this article we’re going to talk about how to repair a small hole in a leather seat lean back, for those of you who don’t know what a lean back is well it’s the upper part of the seat.

Now when I say small this can apply for a tear up to 1 1/2″ to 2″, probably might go a little bigger, but lets not push it, if it needs to go to the upholstery shop for an insert then that would be better then a crappy looking leather repair on something that probably wouldn’t hold anyways. When in doubt, insert it. Read the rest of this entry »