This is a multi-part series on a project I tackled to restore the interior of my 24-year-old Ferrari 328 GTS using products from Leatherique. Throughout this series, I’ll give you some background and show you the “before” condition of the leather. I’ll walk through the Conditioning and Cleaning process, the Re-Dying process and, finally, show the end result.
I hope this series as much fun to read as was the actual restoration work (and seeing the end result).
Part 3: “Live and let dye…”
Due to the failed hard dive, I haven’t been able to post for the past several weeks. The pictures I wanted to use that actually showed how I did the leather re-dye will take some time to recover. Lesson learned….back-up, back-up, back-up and back-up some more. But the blog must go on….
Luckily, I had never dyed the ebrake handle on the 328. In preparing for the 2011 Ferrari Club of America (FCA) national meet, I needed to re-dye the emergency brake handle to match the rest of the interior. One evening—in final prep of the car for transport to Savannah—I had my wife take a couple pictures over my shoulder.
To refresh your memory since my last post on the re-dye process, you may recall me saying, “I wanted to preserve the original color of the stitching at all costs”. This involved a painstaking process of “cutting in” around each and every thread of every item that was dyed (seats, door panels, center console and so on) with a small hobby brush. Then, using part of a white terry towel, I filled in around the stitching with several, coats of dye that was thinned considerably with bottled water. All in all, the re-dye of the 328’s interior took nearly three months to complete (yes…..three months during the winter). But, that is only working a couple hours per night, three or four nights out of the week and eight to ten hours each weekend (but not every weekend). I could have airbrushed the dye on in a day, but the integrity of the stitching would have been compromised. My goal was to take this seemingly forgotten 328 and bring it to concours condition. The only way the interior would be concours quality was to re-dye using my “hybrid method” of wipe dye (borrowed from Mike Charness) or completely replace the hides that covered the entire interior. I felt if completely new hides were a “10”, my re-dye job would have to be a solid “9”. (Remember, the condition of the leather was good…very limited wear and no rips or tears…plus, this was not a color change…just simply refreshing the color to its original “unfaded” state).
Now, that said, these pictures show how I cut-in around each tread. Then, once again, I took the dye and thinned it down a bit with bottled water and began the process of “wipe dying” the leather—basically, filling in around the stitching with several very light, thin coats. I did this until the area I was filing in with the thinned dye matched the color of the area applied via brush next to the stitching. I used a hair dryer to dry each coat so I could immediately apply another. I don’t recall the exact number of coats that were applied, but, again, keep applying until the area cut in with the brush and the larger area blend together. The entire re-dye of the ebrake handle took a couple hours (including prep, positioning the seat to get to all of the leather surface that needed attention, placing plastic around the handle over the carpet, the actual act of re-dying, getting my wife to shoot a couple pictures and clean-up).
A close-up of the meticulous process of applying dye via a hobby brush to the leather surrounding each stitch.
A slightly different angle.
A close-up that is a tad out of focus (but you get the idea).
You’ll probably ask, “How did you get dye around the threads without getting dye on the threads?” The answer is simple: “Very Carefully!” Taking time to do the job right (three months!), being patient and breaking the work up in manageable chunks certainly helped the cause. Did my hand ever slip? Sure! But, it was very minimal and in places that you’d likely never notice. A steady hand, some good 80’s music and lots of free time were key to the success of this project.
