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Old Jan 2, 2016 | 12:38 AM
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Mike-in-Orange
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Joined: Jul 2007
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Default Interior restoration/color change

I did a partial change to the interior color of the SSB Coupe I bought back in May of this year. The seat bolsters were pretty worn and just looked really tired and, since this car is all black inside (or whatever dark grey it's actually called) and my '05 Roadster has the nice dark/light grey two tone, I wanted to do something different. Having seen a lot of newer cars in a variety of paint colors with a saddle brown two tone interior, that's what I opted for. So, here's the finished product - seats pulled out and refinished in Luez Cinamon Brown, a BMW X5 factory color option, door panels done in a two tone with the same BMW color and the existing Crossfire factory color.
Click the image to open in full size.












OK, so how did I do this? I've been talking to a company called ColorBond Paint for a couple of years at the SEMA show and finally decided to pull the trigger. This is basically a specialized spray paint designed specifically for leather, vinyl and even carpet. They are actually an approved Ford OEM supplier (took 'em 6 years to go through the process) and they private label to a bunch of places that sell leather dye and color change kits (Eastwood for one). Their demos and samples at their booth at SEMA have always impressed me and after some long discussions with the developer of the product (it's been around for almost 20 years now!!).

So the process is pretty straightforward - use their pre cleaner to deep clean the surface of any dirt, oils, silicones, waxes, etc and then basically just spray the product on like you would spray regular old spray paint. On harder surfaces, like the door panels, you need to spray their adhesion promoter first, let dry, then shoot the color. I pulled the seats out of the car and then used a plastic masking material for the seats to mask off the lower portions where the seat adjustment controls are mounted, and also to mask off the black plastic seat backs. I found that tucking the plastic in between the leather surface and these trim bits worked best.

The door panels were a bit trickier. After removing them from the car I found that I couldn't get any kind of masking tape to stick to them at all, even after using the cleaner. But since the door panels are made up of multiple pieces that are basically glued together on the back side, I discovered that I could take a wide masking tape (1.5" width) and using a bondo spreader I could force the tape inbetween the two sections and it stayed put extremely well. In some areas I needed a secondary plastic trim stick to force the gap open a bit, but it all worked out great. I then used the same sort of plastic masking material, taped down to the original wide masking tape I tucked into the gaps, and I was ready to shoot the adhesion promoter and the color. When done, the masking tape that was tucked into the gaps just pulled right out - no muss, no fuss.

The leather still feels like it always did, and I love the color combo - especially with the SSB paint!

I'd read a ton of reviews on this product in the past couple of years, including one where a magazine was so skeptical that they recolored a long piece of leather and then did everything they could to get the ColorBond product to fail - they pulled, tugged, scratched, even tied it in a knot - and the stuff stayed put. Crazy as it sounds, this stuff is the real deal. If you've got badly worn side bolsters and you want to restore them, it's very straightforward to return the seat to an as new condition. If you want to totally change the color, like I did, then this is a great option with awesome results.

NOTE: I have no affiliation whatsoever with ColorBond. I paid full retail for the products and received zero compensation for using it or posting this review.
 
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