The other reason to get moving and take advantage of the unseasonally fine weather was to get at least some of my carpets recolored; this needed to happen so I could get them in the car before I could reinstall the center console, itself removed about a year ago when I pulled the dash.
This car has the "Linen" interior and the carpets were an eyesore when it first came into my possession. This is how they looked then:
I'd worked them over pretty hard (summer 2019) with heavy-duty cleaners, the garden hose and vigorous scubbing, showing little mercy (as I'd learned from a lovely guy by the name of Thinh Van Le, in the reconditioning department at a dealer group I once worked for. Thinh had been a helicopter mechanic in South Vietnam and came to the U.S. as the conflict came to an end; a hard-working and completely honorable man who raised a family here by working his tail off at the same dealership for 35+ years, prepping used cars).
That got them nominally much cleaner, but still badly stained:
Long story short:
I used the same SEM Color Coat product as I'd used on the dash, albeit in a complimentary hue I chose from their stock palette. I bought a natural bristle scrub brush at my local hardware store and, with it and my shop vac, got the carpet pieces ready.
The fear of doing this is that the carpets will lose all their softness and feel like super-glued astroturf, but that is not the case. Yes, this is a coating, not a dye. The process will make the word "opacity" come to mind, because you're more "re-tinting" than changing the color - it would have been different if I were changing the color to black.
When you have a dark stained area, you cannot just lay a whole lot of paint in that one area; doing so will yield the glued-astroturf result. Rather, you just keep misting on light coats; I waited ten minutes between coats and both brushed and vacuumed before adding more. I shot the Color Coat from my big/production-size HF gravity feed HVLP gun; the product does not require thinning; it goes on easily and dries quickly.
The vinyl binding on the carpets and the driver's pedal pad is the color you see in the can ... the color I chose. But - think opacity - that's not the final color of the carpets; it's sinking in and re-tinting the original color of the fibers.
I think this stuff is incredible. A friend of mine who does high-end 911 work used it recently on a couple of vinyl pieces he need to change and was blown away by the results. The specialists who visit car dealerships to touch-up used cars prior to any customers seeing them use it and have the skill to tint tiny batches to match anything they're working on. My goal was never perfection; rather, I was hoping that I could get these stained and abused carpets to look respectable, mabe like those from a well-cared for five year old car.
Yes, we'll see how they wear but at this point I'd say I was successful.
Thanks for checking out this blog.
John