With our mechanical work done, and a new dash pad in the car, it was time to really focus on cleaning up the rest of our interior.
This involved mostly scrubbing. From the headliner to the door and other interior panels to the carpet, we just scrubbed and scrubbed until we got everything cleaned up.
We used Simple Green, mixed …
Tim et al,
Try using Folex on carpets & upholstery, but test it on an unseen area first. I've used in on my original owner `85 325e carpet & `88 VW Westfalia carpet & cloth upholstery with great results.
Folex is sold in spray qt & gal jugs at Home Depot etc., as well as by Waxie Inc in Santa Ana CA (online for you back east & midwest).
You'll find that it does a far better job than Resolve & any of the other products which you tried on this 318is refurb.
PS - Forget Armour All - it off gasses oils etc. & leaves the vinyl greasy. I find Vinylex better (Leatherex for leather).
Cheers!
Tom
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RE: Armor-All. STP Son of a Gun is better in that respect also.
RE: Armor All. For hard surfaces, I like a wipe and cloth buff with some 303 Aerospace. Plastic and vinyl look and feel clean with none of the Armor All off gassing, greasy feel, slipperiness, etc... Even better, it's a UV protectant so it helps prevent fading, cracking, and other UV on plastic ailments.
I just did a first pass at the interior in my '91 318is, after driving it home from Montana to the Oregon Coast last week. The vinyl surfaces got scrubbed with Griot's Interior Cleaner, which got the muddy boot streaks off the driver's door. I didn't find it at first, so the dash pad (which looks about like the "before" picture from yours) just got a spritz with some "interior quick detail" and then my favorite treatment for really any interior vinyl, Mother's Back-to-Black.
While the Griot's black-bumper stuff actually has black pigment in it (and the rear bumper rub strip on my 318is will need it), the Mother's stuff is just a thick white goop that soaks into any plastic. I used it on my wife's grey Audi interior. All it does is intensify the color a bit and give it good protection.
We haven't tackled the carpets and upholstery yet; the carpet looks pretty good (with properly sized black mats over the grey loop pile carpet), and the seats are okay except for the ubiquitous driver's outboard bolster. I resorted to the well-known trick of slipping a black T-shirt over the seatback for the drive home. My wife is a dab hand with a sewing machine and makes her own patterns (she did a GREAT protective cover for the M.G. TD a couple years ago), and she's looking forward to preparing something cool for the driver's seat.
We're also probably going to make a dash cover out of black alcantara and some kind of backing/batting, just because we can. I'm trying to decide whether to glue it down to the entire surface like a WRC car or use velcro tabs so we can take it off. That would be smartest, but in the immortal words of Firesign Theater, "I think we're all bozos on this bus."
I bought a mechanic's Mercedes 300sd - mechanically in great shape but the interior was wrecked from many years of greasy, grimey use. Nowhere inside the car had escaped the grit, oil and black smears. Friends laughed at my dirty purchase. One week later they were convinced I'd tricked them by switching cars. My secret was pulling all the carpet out, even the glued down trim pieces and soaking them in a tub of diluted Purple Power for a few days. After that I found a car wash with heated water and those clamps on the wall for floor mats and I blasted my carpet to as-new, minty fresh condition. The MB-Tex upholstery cleaned up perfectly too, a testament to 80's German engineering.
The down-side to all this work was the friend who offered me 10x what I'd paid for the car, so I let it go. Beware the lure of piles of money.
Note: wear gloves!
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