Leather Prep

Everything leather-covered that can come out has come out. I hadn't planned on removing the lower portion of the dash, but it turns out it was easier to take it out than to try and remove the eyeball vents, the side vents or the speaker covers with the dash in place. Here you can see what is left of the passenger compartment.

The last little bit of leather by the windshield is glued to the car. In fact, the leather is tucked into the channel that the windshield is bonded to, so in order to replace that leather you have to remove the glass. Fotunately, the leather is in good shape. It will get redyed with the rest of the interior after some prep work.

Here you can see the lower dash out of the car. Taking these cars apart gives you some insight as to how they were put together. There appears to be a lot of hand assembly with these cars, as the center stack with the HVAC controls and stereo appear to be assembled after the lower dash pad is put into place. I couldn't get the frame to fit through the opening without stripping all of the components out of it first. There are also a lot of little bits screwed to the lower dash, like electrical modules, relays, and such. These could have been put in place before the dash was installed and then attached to the wiring harness. Another interesting tidbit is Lotus' mantra of making each part perform multiple uses in order to save weight. This is even true with rivits. The fuse panel and relays are tucked into the opening on the left side of the dash panel. The relay holders clip together and are then rivited to the fibreglass dash panel. There are two rows of relays - the one on the left hand side backs up to the fuse panel. The rivits for the relays also help hold the fuse panel in place.



Before the leather can be redyed, it needs to be prepared. Leather dye isn't really a dye like a fabric dye. It is not absorbed into the leather, rather it is applied to the leather a lot like paint. Unlike paint, leather dyes are very flexible and somewhat porous - but not very. All of that leather conditioner we slather on our cars doesn't get into the leather unless you close up the car and park it in the sunlight for a few hours. Anyway, before you can apply new dye, you really need to remove as much of the old dye as possible. You do this by wet sanding the leather with 320-grit wet/dry sandpaper. You need to pay close attention while doing this, because if you go too far, you create suede. You also need to be careful around folds and seams - folds because they become suede faster because they are raised, and seams because you don't want to sand the thread in the seams. Below you can see how the back panel looks after I sanded half of it.



And here you can see how some of the smaller bits look after dye removal. All of the leather is salvageable, with the exception of the instrument binnacle. The leather around the defroster vent has become unglued over the years and has started to shrink and dry out. It doesn't appear that it will ever be pliable enough to glue back down.



The next step is to start treating the leather with Leatherique's Rejuvenator Oil. This stuff really works well with the dye out of the way. I treated the leather in my '83 Esprit with this stuff 10 years ago when I thought I would replace the leather anyway. That leather was like cardboard - very stiff. I sanded the dye off and treated the panels with the rejuvenator oil twice a day for several weeks. At first, I couldn't get halfway down the door panel with a handful of the oil before it was all absorbed. By the end of the treatments, you could still see some oil on the surface for an hour or two after I rubbed it down. I'll do the same with this leather.