Leather restoration

V70r carbon · Post by **V70r carbon** » 03 May 2017, 01:26

Does anyone have any recommendations for restoring hairline cracking on leather seats?

Post by **hausmeister** » 03 May 2017, 04:33

I bought a restoring set locally... basically some mixed leather paint and some filler/glue and stuff. I guess It works ok, but my seat was too far gone for it to really help. It looked a lot better afterwards, but imo it was to damaged to be really fixable.
Here are some (after) pics of my front seats. The passenger side is still good.

It helped with the looks, but still feels like crap, and also there is now a big tear in the drivers side. Imo this stuff is good for improving looks short term, but not a long term solution.
For small cracks it should be fine, maybe even try some leather oils or something first to make it pliable again, maybe that is all you need.

Post by **SonicAdventure** » 03 May 2017, 05:56

Probably have only two real options; replace seat altogether with a better one or remove the OEM upholstery and either replace it with new or try to patch / stitch in repairs on the OEM parts of yours that are compromised.

I re-skinned my drivers seat bottom, and replaced both of the flip forward lower rear seat sections in my car. Still need to do the passenger side front seat bottom but that was the least bad of the four. So far I think I've spent about $25-30 on all of this from the junkyard, but it took time and several visits to find viable donors. Your seats look like R type seats which may be harder to find. If you can get the OEM base skins off, maybe finding a competent and reasonably priced upholstery shop to stitch new center panels into the suede sides would be a good alternative.