Complete Leather Color Restoration & Repair Kit

I uploaded a picture, of my improved Tan Leather Seat back. This worked great to repair a cracked and torn seat back, upper corner, next to a seam, on my Honda Accord leather seats. Here are some tips & tricks. The materials are there, but you must supply a lot of patience and a lot of skill. The instructions are ok as a baseline, but far from good. Another review listed longer more detailed instructions which helped me a lot. I'd add the following. For my cracked seats: First clean the area, then I sanded it with 80 grit, then 400 grit, sand paper. This took off the high spots on the seat. Clean the area again to remove dust. Then use 3-4 layers of the supplied filler material (~glue consistency). Then use a hair dryer to speed up the drying time between coats of the filler material. In fact I used a hair dryer to dry the filler coats, and the paint coats. It really speeds up the whole process. For the paint one reviewer had a brilliant idea to help mix colors. Take one bottle of a color you know you won't use, in my case Green, and rinse it out. I can then use that as a mixing bottle and it preserves the paint from drying out. Here is a new tip for mixing color: I have tan/beige leather seats. To mix the right shade, outside of the car on a bench I filled my empty paint bottle 1/3 with white, then added drops of brown and mixed it with a long carpentry nail. I placed the headrest on the bench and held the nail next to the headrest to match the color. Slowly I added more drops of brown to shade the white to the right tone of tan. The provided instructions are good about telling you how to mix colors, and what base colors to use. I added brown, and a few drops of red to made the right tone of tan. I then applied the paint in a few coats, and dried the paint with a hair dryer to speed the drying. The paint dries a little darker then the wet color. I was happy I used a hair drier to speed the process, and I was able to quickly match the paint after about 4 coats. Each time I added more brown to slowly tint the white darker to match the existing leather seat. The final color match is perfect. Perfect. I used my own small brushes to feather out the color beyond the patched area, and the patched color is invisible. I didn't use the textured paper until the end. As a final coat, now with the perfect paint color, I put on a thin coat of paint and used the texture paper to add some texture to the paint surface. This adds some texture and kind of makes it look like leather again. The repair is not perfect, but it's significantly better than it was. From 6" you can see where the repair was, but from 1' or more, and if I didn't tell you; the repair disappears into the upholstery of the car. Best of luck!

I got this leather repair kit to attempt to repair one of the armrests in my car which had significant wear after 10+ years of "arm resting" on it! The wear consisted of cracks and rips in the leather, several large ones in the front and many-many tiny ones extending to nearly the middle of its length. So significant was the wear that I actually got a new armrest, but I thought I should give it a try. I had absolutely no previous experience in leather repairing, by the way.I will start by briefly mentioning the instructions: you first apply a repair compound to fill in the gaps/holes in the leather (dries clear), then you paint, and finally you use a sealer compound (clear) to protect the paint if the area is under heavy use (the armrest apparently is; this last step may not be needed for other applications). Pretty simple eh? Read on!Let me just say that I tried the repair twice. The first time I got a disaster! I think another reviewer mentioned it, taping the texture paper overnight after you apply the repair compound (per instructions) results in a sticky situation! The paper is not easy to remove afterwards, and if you apply a wet towel on top of it for 10 minutes to help in removal (per instructions), you still cannot take it all out perfectly, plus the moisture transfers onto the repair compound and weakens it. Rubbing to remove residuals of the paper (per instructions) makes it even worse as you will likely take out some repair compound with it. Not good! I ended up scrubbing (not just rubbing!) the whole thing with water to remove everything and start over. But make a note, this way you will make the original damage a bit worse, as this removes some leather with it.The second time I applied the leather compound and used the spatula and my fingers to apply and make it nearly flush with the original surface. Took me 3-4 passes, once every hour or so. I ended up with a smooth surface, without any leather texture (I attached two photos at this stage - the top ones).The paint was a pain to match, took me 2 days of mixing or so! At least I had the time available while playing with the repair compound :) But you get lots of colors and some basic mixing instructions to get the color you want. You just need patience... lots of it!I then painted the repair, all the way from the front to midway. The paint is kind of thick, and dries out fast. I used the foam applicator to blot and feather away the paint (per instructions). Which is nice in theory, but in reality you end up getting some foam residuals of your project. I ended up using the foam applicator as if I was lightly sanding the project to remove everything (almost) as the paint was still drying. I forgot to mention you also get some brush bristles while painting, which can be removed with the foam applicator, in expense for more foamy residuals! The end result looked just okay, and without any leather texture. It then struck me, to use the texture paper on the paint itself. So I did. I applied another coat and instead of blotting/feathering or whatever, I just took a texture paper and pressed it on the wet paint, took it off after 5-10 seconds, and let the paint dry. The thickness of the paint is enough to preserve the texture and the fast drying helps. The result was a million times better than before (I attached two photos at this stage - the bottom ones).Then I applied a thin coat of sealer with the foam applicator. The end result is very useable, although looking up close and under certain light conditions, you can certainly tell it is a repair and that the texture is not as deep as the original leather. But from 2-3 feet away, it looks very decent. In the car, where the lighting conditions are usually low and uneven, and there are shadows, etc., it looks nearly perfect.Overall, I believe this kit is a decent choice. It is a shame they do not provide you with more texture papers (more of the same kind I mean - you get 3 different textures but only 1 sheet 2-by-2 for each), especially since these are so easy to deteriorate (and if you end up using water to remove them, you can forget about them). To be honest though, I guess on a smaller repair, doing it per instructions might be fine. My repair covered nearly all of the 2-by-2 surface of the paper (and as a result, more of the paper stuck on my project). But anyway, it is just textured paper, so they could have included more of it, in my opinion. The amount of the other materials you are getting is sure to outlast the amount of paper. For instance, after applying the leather repair compound on all this surface twice, I still have more than half of it left.My feelings are kind of mixed however. For a small repair, you might be better off having it repaired professionally (how much more would it cost?) and save yourself the time! For larger repairs, the cost-effectiveness is much better, although you cannot make it "like new". I guess you have to weigh the pros and cons for yourself.

Good product

Really hard to get colour even the brown was too light when applied. Rang a professional in the end.