01MSMSXE10

Hello everyone,

I'm sure many of you 02-05 IS owners suffer from sticky dash, and I'm positive all of our cars have some sort of sun damage to the interior (fading).

back story: my driver's seat in my daily IS300, decided to retire and doesn't want to move forwards/backwards. I'm stuck in an awkward position, just for the record I'm 6'3" just imagine my big @$$ hunched over the steering wheel.

Well the cheapest power seat rack I could find locally or even power seat was close to $250. Um...no. Not something for a 18 year old vehicle. I checked out a local junkyard and they have one of the cleanest IS300's there. I mean this car couldn't have had more than 90k on it. and what's this? Manual CLOTH seats?! I'll take it!

I grabbed every thing I could from the car. didn't care. I think the total was around $200 or so. This was door panels, rear seat, front seats with racks, carpet, a pillars, and some extra ballasts.

now I'm debating on swapping to cloth interior vs keeping my leather escarine. I'll decide on that later.

these cloth seats are in really great shape, and have just a little sun fading, so I picked up a couple cans of duplicolors vinyl and carpet paint. Never used this brand before, no place locally carries SEM color coat (which I highly recommend), figured what the heck give it a shot. I'll let the pictures speak for the product.

so this is what a IS300 cloth seat looks like for those of you that's never seen this combination. personally I'm not particularly fond of the pattern design, but to each their own.
Here's some of the sun fade I got with my cloth seats that's not a shadow, just where the seat belt used to rest on the seat. The head rests were almost blue from the fading.
my weapon of choice for this battle. There are 2 versions. Flat and gloss. This is flat.
one side done. This is the driver's side of the rear seat. it was just as faded as the previous picture of the passenger side.
2 cans on the rear seat. I let it sit out in the sun between each coat.
For around $6 a can, I think it came out pretty nice. I sprayed everything on the rear seat, head rests, center pattern, etc. The coverage of the spray is pretty nice, I'm still a fan of SEM color coat as the coverage is better, but this is definitely a nice product. I do like how the dye dries on the fabric. It's slightly crisp, very similar to starch on clothing. Some may disagree with this, but once again it's personal preference.

I might switch over to cloth seats after all.

01MSMSXE10

as you can see, there's still some fading on the driver's seat in the picture I posted, after a few more coats the fading was blended. it looks uniform now.


all in all,

a solid 4.8/5 stars. pros :Easily available, inexpensive, 2 finish choices flat and gloss (pending on which substrate you're spraying). cons: Coverage could be better, wish the pigment was a little darker, but that can be remedied with more coats.


Now someone bring me a sticky dash so I can refinish that too!

jadu

iTrader: (42)

nicely done with those manual cloth seats!

tv4184

Are the door card inserts also in cloth? I was wondering because I'm getting the seats but I haven't found the door cards...

01MSMSXE10

Yes the door panels have cloth inserts. I would love to find some Altezza modellista interior parts, but I might as well hang that idea up.
this is from an altezza, but the door panel material

toneekay

So after a few months of spray... How does the paint hold up? Does the paint stain clothes, or have you not gotten any of those issues?

tv4184

Thanks. I missed out on a cloth interior, white IS300 with no sunroof back in 2007 and figured this was gonna be the best thing I could do was find the parts. I saw a modellista interior once before but I wasn't sure about it at the time. It was on ebay for like a grand... In retrospect, thats much less than the Euro R interior that I bought for my TSX and never installed...