How To Do Car Upholstery Repair Jobs Yourself Successfully

Autos & TrucksCars

  • Author Temitope Olawumi
  • Published September 12, 2010
  • Word count 667

Car upholstery repair will effectively remove rips, tears and holes from your vehicles upholstery and restore the general beauty of your vehicle's interior. The article below shows you how you can effectively tackle automobile leather and upholstery problems.

Holes, tears and rips are ugly sights in your vehicle interior any day, sometimes caused by your kids or due to long use of your car, and do they really spoil the beauty of your car's interior?. Whenever you see upholstery problems like this, you tend to think about how much you will spend to have the problems solved.

The good news is that you don't have to see a professional to do car upholstery repair, you can do it yourself, and successfully too, all you need is a simple guide which you will get from this article and the few tools that you would use to do the job.

Car Upholstery Repair Step By Step Guide

The things you would need for the repair works are; patches, upholstery thread, upholstery or canvas needle and vinyl repair gel. All these you can get around your house, in your old garage, from friends, and neighbors, or have them bought at the nearest discount store. When you are ready, just follow the steps below one after the other to get your car upholstery repair job done.

  1. Examine the kind and level of damage on the leather work and also on the type of material used for the upholstery, which could be leather, vinyl or woven fabric blend. This is important because, the material used will also affect the repair work you will do, so you need to note this from this from the beginning.

  2. The type of problem on the leather work determines the work to be carried out; holes, for example, should be handled in a different way from maybe holes made by cigarette bums. This will help you to narrow down on the job to do and conclude on how to go about it.

  3. Thread your needle, the thread must be strong, and the needle sturdy and the needle slightly curved, as the normal sewing needle is not good for this kind of job. You can buy suitable upholstery needle from any fabric shop around which will be good for the job you want to do.

  4. Using just simple stitch, you can start to sow the torn area. This simple stitch should be in the form of a crisscross, just like letter x, so that the stitch will be strong enough to hold up the torn or ripped edges. Make sure you make the stitches close together as much as possible to strengthen the overall hold of the stitching.

  5. After stitching, and if the material is made of either vinyl or leather, then apply a small quantity of upholstery gel over the stitching to seal up the stitched surface and use a patch that has a similar grain to indent the surface of the gel, to make a pattern that will soften the look of the stitches.

  6. Allow the applied gel to get dried and do a check. You will observe that the gel had completely sealed off the torn area thereby preventing further damage, thus the gel will effectively protect the stitch and prevent any stretching that can lead to a new rip around the affected place.

Needless to say, if you carry out these simple but effective steps it will save you lot of money you would have given to the so called professionals, moreover, many of those much advertised car upholstery repair kits that can completely make the torn or rip totally unnoticeable are not true.

If the tears or rips is much wider, you may need to completely replace the upholstery or covered with slip over vehicle seat cover after stitching.

Stop leaving your vehicle's upholstery unattended to, because you don't believe you have enough money to repair it yet. Take your necessary tools and do the car upholstery repair job yourself. Yes you can.

Get more information about car upholstery repair and cheap auto part sources.

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