Automotive Interior Repair with The Interior Guy

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 must see. Leather Magic is something else, if this product does what it says then wow. Not only is durable it stretches and holds in place.

There are a few downfalls, one the curing time. 48 hours, maybe for an individual but not for a tech in the field. The compounds I know of are quick and easy…And work. But if there is the repair that will hold up like that and then I’m all for to checking it out, looks. The other concern I have is dye, dying onto a wet surface…HMMMM. Don’t know. Well I’ll make a check into this and see.

Leather repair is a craft and not all products will work on everything. Trial and error to extent, but cleaning and prepping your area extensively, before you start any project will make your ending result a success.

Hope you like this it is pretty wild stuff.

If you got any comments on this one let me know, I’m really curious to see what everyone thinks on Leather Magic.

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 »

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 »

GOT A CRACK IN YOUR SEAT?

Let me show you how the problem started, how to fix the problem, and how to prevent the problem from happening again.

Well of course I’m talking about your leather or vinyl car and boat seats. Read the rest of this entry »