Anyone used leather restoration kits such as Leatherique? Recommendations needed.

I debated posting this in the GRM forum or here and decided here may be a better bet.

The title should be self-explanatory. Does anyone have experience with automotive leather seat restoration? There are a plethora of products on the market such as Leatherique, FurnitureClinic etc. as well as shops that will do it. Are these all basically the same or is there one shop or brand that clearly better/worse than the others?

The seats on my closing in on 80k miles 1999 Boxster are looking a bit the worse for wear with some very noticeable wear on the drivers bolster and the join to the side. See the crappy pic below. Should I just go for one of the over the counter kits or is it too far gone?

Thanks for any comments or advice.

Semi related:

I'm 2/3 of the way through their steering wheel kit. I'll let you know how it turns out. I've heard nothing but good things about them.

In reply to Woody:

Leatherique or one of the others?

Thanks

Interested in this, too.

Once I can find the time for it, I plan to restore the seats in my Buick with a sewing machine I paid $25 for at Goodwill and a leather jacket I found at a different thrift store. The damage to this seat was a bit beyond what could be fixed with something in a can, though.

Adrian_Thompson wrote: In reply to Woody: Leatherique or one of the others? Thanks

Leatherique.

No leather restoration elixir will repair broken stitching or torn edges like you have there. I have used the Leatherique products to bring flexibility back to brittle 70 year old seats in cars we resurrect instead of restore. It is magic at turning cardboard that looks like it came out of an Egyptian pyramid into soft pliable leather, but this isn't what you need.

Important thing to remember is that leather seats are painted from the factory. They have to do this for consistency. Natural hides are very different from inch to inch and cow to cow so they cover it with an opaque paint.

Here is the fix for that worn patch. Take a pile of terry cloth rags and a quart of lacquer thinner. Don your gloves, soak the rags in the thinner and go crazy at the panel with the wear. You can easily remove the grey paint the factory applied and take it down to bare, albeit stained leather. Once you have it stripped you can.... Trust me on this, I know it sounds odd and bad and totally goes against what feels right but, start wet sanding it with 400 grit and water. You are just trying to smooth out the ridges. But feel free to just go nuts. It will be just as smooth as the rest of the seat, if not step up to 600 or even 800 grit.

At this point a professional (used car lot interior fixer) would start mixing up his paints and airbrushing it to match the rest. It takes them hours to get a good color match. Hopefully your color is the Porsche "graphite" grey that colorbond offers. If that is the case spray away! You might need to do a light coat on the entire seat to really blend it in. I follow that up with an aerosol wax product called "leather sheen" from Tandy leather.

Unfortunately I lost all the pics I had of this process when I did it to a pair of cracked linen colored porsche sport seats a decade ago (damn imagecave!)

I am about to install them in my BMW so I can try and get finished shots and plead with you to believe me that they looked like a dry lake bed when I got them.

I think that is the bulk of it.

I found a few reviews on the auto detailing sites:

Autogeek.

Autopia.

/r/AutoDetailing

Overall, it sounds like it's good stuff.

Jumper gave good advice!

On the British stuff I've used Woolies in the UK.

You can snip a sample of the leather from under the seat where it will not be worn or faded, and send it to them and they'll do up a kit and send it back to you.

http://www.woolies-trim.co.uk/p-1032-no-1-leather-renovation-kit.aspx

What about new covers? I just had covers made by Lseat.com. It took forever (7 weeks) including sending mine in, but they came back amazing and basically look like factory. Might be worth checking out. I got 50% off because they didn't have a pattern for my rover. I'm all for fixing things, buy my driver seat was beyond repair.

Does it work on canoes as well?