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Vintage leather care and coloring

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LuckyLuke

LuckyLuke

Senior Member
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My 63' still has a lot of original nice leather pieces left. Unfortunately they are dry and need re-coloring:

Any recommendations on this topic?

1. Do you know of any good dyes that work for vintage leather?
2. How would you recondition the leather to make it soft? (I heard that oil based products should not be used? What is the alternative?)

Thanks,
 
I have tried most of the various leather treatments that have come along since the early sixties and am sold on Leatherique products. NAYYY.

https://www.leatherique.com/

Most, if not all, British car leather is painted, not dyed. The impervious paint layer prevents leather softners from reaching the dry leather.

The only success I've experienced is to remove the leather and apply the softening treatment to the bare back side. It will take several applications to restore the softness and great leather smell.

Some of the companies that provide the new paint for your leather suggest you send a sample piece of leather from your LBC. Once you remove the seats you'll find excess, nonfaded, leather material that you can snip and send to the supplier for a perfect match to OEM color.

Lacking that, you can send them the Color Code for your leather color.

----

I removed the driver's seat bottom from my Jaguar XJ-S last fall and gave the leather repeated applications of Leatherique's Rejuvenating oil to the back side. It is very soft now so I sanded off as much of the old paint as I could. This weekend I am going to spray it with new paint. :cool:

Don Neff
1991 XJ-S Conv. V12 5-speed
(Magnolia Interior, #AEM)
 
I've never heard of painting leather! Were the Brits the only ones who used this method? The wifes T Bird had white leather seats and we used Lexol on them. Worked great, but they were dyed , not painted. Why would you paint leather?
dunno.gif
 
the Italians/Romans invented most everything that has to do with leather, including forming leather to a given shape.

When leather is soaked in water, it becomes elastic like skin, and it can be stretched over a shape, allowed to dry, and when removed, it retains the shape forever.

Painting, dying, coloring, same thing. One method is faster than the other, and so on.

Have you ever dyed your leather shoes? Same thing. Nurses use White "Dye" to keep their shoes white, you can buy it at the grocery store in black, brown, or white. The white one is a paint.

Ex
 
I still paint the seats after cleaning to regain the old luster. I painted Ford seats and tyre covers with the PPG paints and vinyl additive with pretty good luck. Saw this when I worked at a used car lot and watched the guy fix the dash and touch up the seat. Magic is in the color mixing.
I dyed the seats on a XK 140 and the color seeped onto the clothes for quite a while.
 
color plus for me
 
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