Automotive Interior Repair with The Interior Guy

I’ve run across this one a lot lately. Leather seats turning a shade of Blue on the lighter colored tan and gray leather seats. It’s what I call “Suit Blue”.

What this really is, is when the leather turns a blue color where your back, butt, or arm rests on the wet leather and the dye from your clothing is then transferred to the leather.

The dye from your clothing is actually dyeing the leather in your car. The leather soaks it up like a sponge, like I’ve always said “What you put on leather stays in leather”, and as you see it’s true.

Whats really bad about this is there’s is no cleaner to remove this from the leather without damaging the leather or the leather’s original dye, at least not one that I know about.  Your only solution to this is to have the seats, armrests, ect. resurfaced or dyed to bring it back to it’s original color. Read the rest of this entry »

This was a fun one….Actually it didn’t give me to much of a fit. The leather laid just right, I was able to pull it together quite nicely.

I first cleaned the leather seat thoroughly with my prepping solution, I know I always say this, but I can’t stress prepping enough, it is the only way to a top notch job. Read the rest of this entry »

As you’ve probably noticed on a lot of the newer cars on todays market with a leather interior have a nice little twist to them. A two tone look on the leather seats. Although this looks great and all, dyeing these two tone wonders can be tricky, and can take a while, but if you know the right tricks and use the right materials it can be a breeze. So with that said, heres a few tricks on how to dye a two tone leather seat. Read the rest of this entry »

You left the car window down or the sunroof open and there’s a water stain in your car’s leather seat….or your girlfriend spilled here red wine in your leather car seat on a night out on the town….or your kids decided they were a soon to be artist and tried their techniques out on your leather car seat with a pen, arrggg. Got kids myself, so feel your pain. Stain removal in leather seats can be tough, heres a few tricks to help get you going. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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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 »

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 »

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 »