A CRASH COURSE IN LEATHER

Before we get going in earnest, we should make clear that this one feature is not going to make you an expert leather repairer – the subject is simply too vast and the number of repair types too varied for that to be possible. Instead, what we hope to achieve is to give you a greater understanding of the product, and also to demonstrate the kind of results you could achieve when making a repair using DIY materials. So after a condensed history of leather and of the various types available, we will show how to repair a small hole such as a cigarette burn. For this we will use a piece of modern leather, which tends to have a protective polyurethane layer on top as we shall shortly see. Older cars up until the mid-1970s are likely to have untreated leather and a repair on these will vary in detail, though the basics will be the same. However, we are not going all modern on you, because owners of many classic sports cars from the likes of MG and Triumph will have fitted brand new leather covers to their seats, either because the original fabric covers have worn beyond repair or simply as part of a general upgrade.

We should also sound a note of caution when assuming that the original leather you may have in your classic is still to original spec. Our project Nissan Figaro, for example, was fitted with leather from new, but the seats had always felt hard and plasticky to us.