Automotive Interior Repair with The Interior Guy

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 here’s the right way to apply dyes to a finished leather seat. 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 »

Color Matching is a huge skill and a must in the leather repair industry. I’ve been coming across a few vehicles lately that have been dyed with not so good color matching. Knowing that it’s usually someone either color blind or just down right…well I won’t go that far, but if the color isn’t right then your repair will look worse then if you had just left it alone.

Good lighting does help and pretty much a necessity. Natural lighting is better but in the garages we get stuck in the winter months it doesn’t help much, but what do you do, you improvise as my wife says. I use a dent light, which works pretty good, but I have also have used a under the hood light bar then hooking inside the car that stretches the width of the car and hooks on the door jams, they work great. Shorter light bars are great for light in a small places. Be careful with using florescence they sometimes throw your tinting off, if you can get some natural light to your project then great. The customer sees the the car in natural light mostly anyways so your color needs to be spot on.

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This is a hard one for me to put out there for the average person to read because a lot of the products I use in my leather repairs are sold for professional use and if you don’t know how to use them properly you can make a bad thing look like a really bad repaired thing. It’s taking me a long time to master the craft of leather repair, it’s something you can’t just learn by reading this article. But I wanted to help out those of you who need a helping hand with that worn leather seat. Read the rest of this entry »

This is one thing that theres NOT a lot that can be done to fix. Leather has a grain, and a natural tendency to crease in a fashion that isn’t that appealing to some. Keeping the leather soft by keeping it clean and conditioning it can keep those creases from turning into cracks and in some cases from forming at all. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most asked questions I get is what to put on the leather seats to keep them soft and looking new and how to do it. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a few tips to cleaning those old grungy looking automotive leather seats. Now there are limitations to this, in some cases the seats are just dirty and with a little elbow grease and little know how you have new seats again. But there are the cases where a professional needs to reapply dye to the seat to bring back the original luster. “Rattle cans” as I call them which are aerosol cans of dye that you can buy at your local paint store which if you find the right shade can be used to freshen up a seat where cleaning just wasn’t enough. But I really do discourage this due to most of the dyes sold on the shelf are a lacquer base which can dry the leather out and cause it to crack. Read the rest of this entry »