How to clean the ever living @#$% out of your seats

Away from the greasy, gooey, gunky mechanical part of the car and back to the real dirty stuff.  You remember how dirty my seats were, right?

Here's my method of undoing all that nastiness.  I've used a lot of products on a lot of interiors over the years, and this is what works best for me. It works well on leather and vinyl, though you'd want to be careful is dealing with really old and dry interiors.  First thing, hose the whole thing down with Simple Green.

Scrub it up, wipe dry, and repeat as necessary.  Here's how it looks after three rounds of scrubbing:

Better, but it's still pretty dirty.  The problem is the texture of the material.  While the surface is clean, the grain of the material is still full of dirt.  The best way to get this out is with a toothbrush.  Seriously.  I toothbrushed the entire seat.  Also, don't use your real toothbrush, use an old one.

A Mr. Clean Magic Eraser works wonders too.  Here we are after many scrubbings and Magic Erasings:

Normally, this is good enough.  Not this car though.  I don't know what the guy was carrying in his back seat, but it was something.  It was almost like tar, but wasn't.  It left stains that required more persuasion.

The first solvent I always try is mineral spirits.  It's very mild and shouldn't do any harm to the material.  I've tested it on hundreds of leathers and vinyls, and I've never had it cause any damage.  As always, test in an inconspicuous spot first just in case. 

Mineral spirits got most of it off, but not all.  So, I started working my way up the solvent chain to harsher solvents.  You have to be extremely careful doing this, if you're not careful, this WILL RUIN YOUR SEATS.  These stains were incredibly stubborn and I ended up using just about the harshest solvent out there, MEK.  MEK WILL melt vinyl, and WILL strip the color off the leather.  You must be quick with it, it can't sit on the material for any length of time, just quick wipes.  It's VERY easy to mess up and ruin your seat.  The MEK did the trick and lifted the stain out(or at least 95% of it, you can just barely see it if you know where to look).

Congratulations, you've successfully cleaned your seats.  You've also removed up any built up Armor-All or other "protectants" people have applied over the years.  You've also stripped some of the leather's natural oils.  We need to put all that back.  The internet rages over what products work best.  My preference is Lexol for the leather, and Mother's VLR for the vinyl.  The VLR is nice because it doesn't dry shiny.  It gives you a nice satin look, not the plastic look Armor-All and similar silicone based products leave.  Since the Impala's leather is perforated, I put on way too much Lexol, then rub it in down through the holes.  This way, it helps condition the leather from both sides.  When your done, you'll have a nice, clean, well cared for seat.

 

I'm feeling super lazy, which is like regular lazy, but I'm also wearing a cape.

Preventative maintenance time.  At 164K miles, I question the life left in the Impala's fuel pump.  I had one go bad in the Caprice with far fewer miles.  The guy also said that the gas gauge reads 1/4 full when it's actually empty.  Substandard fuel pump wiring and sending units that go out of whack are both common problems on these cars, so I decided to take car of them both.  I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, or cover territory that someone else has already done.  So, for this post, I'm not going to go into too much detail.  Suffice to say, I did THIS and THIS.  I used an Airtex pump harness with a new Delco fuel pump, they're pretty cheap on e-bay.  If you read the second link, you know about the fuel sender wiper getting dirty.  Here's mine.  Gee, can't imagine why it might not read accurately...

I also discovered another minor problem.  The fuel return line had come unsoldered from the cap.  Judging by the rust and buildup on the top of the sender, it has been like this a while.  That would explain the faint fuel smell when driving around on a full tank.

I clipped the line back into the clip, and resealed the connection with Seal-All.  It may seem hokey, but trust me, it works.  Seal-All is fuel resistant and sticks to about everything.  I've used it to repair actively leaking radiators, and even a roadside repair on an actively dripping fuel line that rusted through.  The stuff is simply amazing.

While I had the tank out, I took the opportunity to do some rust prevention too.  All the metal under the tank was painted with Eastwood's Rust Encapsulator, then sprayed with Amsoil's HD Metal Protector.  The first seals and kills any existing rust, the second leaves a self healing water repelling waxy coating on the surface.  All the seams, nooks, and crannies get a liberal coating of it, as well as an overall coat of the whole area.  The metal parts of the fuel pump module got a coating of HDMP too.