Vinyl seat repair: what to use?

[vagt6]

One of my nice seats has a rip in it about 2 inches long smack dab in the middle of the upright part of the seat. The rip is in the "channel" part of the seam and should be relatively easy to fix. I have vinyl seat covers, autumn leaf color.

What's a good repair product to fix a small tear? What do you use?

 

[jvandyke]

The name of it escapes me at the moment. Goopy liquid in a tube smear it on and if you get it to lay out decent it covers and sticks pretty good, certainly not invisible but I used it to hide rips with pretty good success. I always had black though, which probably hides easier. I would sometimes add a bit of color with a black marker, dull the finish as instructed and it would hide well, not sure about autumn leaf though, I'm sure you could find the right color marker if you go to an art supply store.

Pretty sure it was this stuff. At most any hardware/automotive place. Short term "fix" and the cheap way out to be sure.
Have you shown it a car upholstery guy? sometimes they can fix stuff like that surprisingly cheaply.

 

[Jim_Gruber]

Put a piece of vinyl behind it, use it to bridge the gap in the rip.

 

[dklawson]

As Jim suggested, when I've dealt with tears and holes in seats I've placed a piece of cloth reinforced vinyl on the backside of the tear and glued it in place with Vinyl glue. Most hardware stores carry one brand or another of clear vinyl glue that will work.

When I've been dealing with tears that were unsightly and I wanted to hide them better, I've patched the backside first and then (on black seats) used liquid vinyl (hardware store liquid electrical tape) to carefully fill in the front side. If you're after a better looking front side patch, there are vinyl repair kits that include little jars of colored vinyl "paste" that you trowel into the crack or hole. Then you used a "graining paper" over that with a small (soldering) iron to create a permanent patch that virtually disappears. The link below is to one such example...
https://www.leatherworldtech.com/Products/LeatherVinyl-Repair-Kit__30-442.aspx

 

[Jim_Gruber]

I made several cigarette burns on Bugsy's original seat totally disapper with one of those kits.

 

[bthompson]

If you're cheap like me and just want a quick-and-easy fix instead of goopy stuff; I used upholstery thread to <span style="font-style: italic">sew </span>the tears up. (Use a piece of scratch vinyl on the backside to sew to, so the thread doesn't rip out.)

Here's some of my needlework...

The repairs were less obvious when it was black-on-black, before I re-dyed the seats. I don't mind it; sorta gives the seats provenance.

 

[histerical]

Bill, are you saying that those seats were black before you dyed them ?

 

[bthompson]

Yep. Had the standard black all the way through. Looked like the Black Hole of Calcutta. Dyed the whole thing, and it's much cheerier now. :banana: