I got hold of this trim that had been sitting outside a breakers in deepest Hampshire. It was on ebay and looked basically structurally ok in the piccies if a bit dirty and scuffed here and there. I set myself a bidding limit and won the auction, my plan being to re-colour it in Pearl beige. Firstly I tried to find out what colour it was, and eventually found a paper sheet under the back seat with the colour code and chassis number. It turned out to be Taurus Red and it came out of a 1986 528i auto (paint code and chassis number on this sheet ).
When I got it home and gave it a clean and feed with the Gliptone cleaner and conditioner and it started to look ok. So I decided that rather than have the aggro of stripping it all down and re-colouring to try and go more brown with it and see if a contrast would be ok with the lighter carpet etc in the car, thinking I could still go beige at a later date. It unfortunately had a seem split at the top of rear backrest and the stitching on the bases was worn away completely ! but I figured these would be easily repaired buy a trimmer I have used several times in the past.
How it was when I collected it :
I sent a sample of leather off to Gliptone and asked them to supply a 500ml scuffmaster kit and to not mix any red into it. Once the kit arrived I treated the trim to a good deep clean with a brush and fed it over several days to soften the leather. Then I started applying the scuffmaster initially with a sponge, but found that careful brushing produced an excellent finish, if you have the space/equipment you can spray it too which would be the best way.
Whilst all this was going on a fellow E28er sent me a pair of uncovered headrests and a rear shelf with blind to complement the new trim.
Also to keep the cost of re-trimming the rear headrests down the trimmer suggested I got hold of some cloth ones so that he could use them as a pattern, luckily another mate with E28 misgivings had just decided to break a 528i and he let me have the rear headrests to help the cause.
Once I was happy with the finish on the seats I took my trim and headrests to the trimmer and got him to re-stitch the backrest, re-stitch the seat bases and re-trim my bare headrests in leather. The headrests were a little more red then the rest when I got them back so I treated them with a few coats of the scuffmaster to match them up. Just before all this I has also bought some ebay gatiors to replace my knackered original one and also one for the handbrake in beige, (I hate that stupid brush) so I re-coloured these to match too and treated myself to a Storm Motorwerks handbrake handle to match the gear knob ! Whilst doing this I thought I should match up the doorcards as well so I stripped them all down and re-coloured those to match too !
You can buy all the fittings from BMW for the rear headrests, I just had to drill holes in the rear shelf for them to go through, then fit the plastic hole covers and the metal brackets that support them. One of the rear blind hooks was broken and the E28 part is NLA, however the E30 blind hooks are available (and appear indentical to me ?) so I got those instead.
So here is the final result which I am pleased with. Opinions / ideas welcome !
This is the outside (for those who don't know)
