[heups1629]

I’ve had my ’69 LeMans convertible for about 4 years now. Ever since I bought it, the faded back seats bothered me – there were light splotches that were even more apparent in the sunshine. I bought some vinyl dye with the thought of getting the vinyl appearance back to a nice shine that I see on other cars. I bought the upholstery prep cleaner from Ames, and using the scrubber side of a sponge, removed the back seat bottom and gave it a good scrubbing. I had a bucket of warm clear water that I used to rinse it off using a rag.

After one rinse, the clean water was became a very dark shade of brown. Starting with new clean water, I repeated the process on the same seat – same result. I ended up doing this 3-4 times on the one seat, before the rinse water looked reasonably clear. I repeated this on all of the upholstery, and was pretty shocked at not only how dirty the interior was, but how much blacker the interior looked afterward. After finishing it off with an Upholstery Finishing spray – it looks pretty good! My seats weren’t faded, they were DIRTY!

I’ve wiped the seats down with a wet rag plenty of times, but that just gets some surface dust – not the ground in gunk. I’ll put the upholstery cleaning (and any other plastic surface) on my annual “to-do” list every Spring from now on…

[north]

Where the car is from seems to matter. I've noticed on cars I've had that came from Los Angeles have a blackish hard to delve grime on everything from the grille to the lugnuts. Must be the smog!