Well I finally got one of the front seats finished. Here is a short picture view of the process using Leatherique products.
I started with the seat shown in the earlier posts.
Step 1 - wet sand the leather using the Prepping Agent from Leatherique. The Prepping Agent softens the dye on the leather making it sand off quite easily. I used 400 grit wet sandpaper. Here is how it looked after sanding.
Step 2 - fill the cracks with the Crack Filler product from Leatherique. This is a white paste that goes into the cracks. I applied a couple of coats in the large cracks. Here is what it looked like after applying the Crack Filler before the second sanding.
Step 3 - second sanding. I actually sanded, applied additional Crack Filler and sanded several times. I also ended up poking a needle into all the holes in the leather as the crack filler filled them in. Here is the result ready for dyeing.
Step 4 - apply the dye. I tried using a brush on a sample piece but found it took three coats and used a lot of dye. I ended up using a pencil sprayer with my compressor to spray on the dye. For the most part, only two coats were needed. I bought "Cork" colored dye as that is the original color for my car. The seats had been replaced some time ago and were "Champagne". Here is the final dyed result.
Since the color changed, I decided to mask the piping to give it a two tone look. If it doesn't look okay I can always brush more dye on the piping and make is a single color. The piping is not leather - it is plastic. Here are a couple more pictures of the final results.
I'm really happy with the results so far - they look like new. Just a bit of cleaning up to do to remove the dye due to my poor masking and minor touch-ups in a few places and it is ready to back in the car. The only bad news is that I now have to re-dye the back seats and door panel pieces because of the color change.
Rick